Camp Arcanum

by Josef Matulich

  “Thank you for your time, Ms. Czarnecky.” He definitely was not grateful. He turned and opened the door.

  “It was nothing, Sgt. Throckmorton,” she said with all honesty.

  With barely concealed disgust, Throckmorton left. Brenwyn’s restraint disappeared with him. Resting her head in her hands, Brenwyn fought to hold back her tears.

  There was a discrete tap on the door

  “Yes?” Brenwyn sniffled.

  “Are you the woman that came in with Marc Sindri?” an unknown man asked through the door.

  “Yes,” Brenwyn said as she gathered her composure about her. “Do you have any word?”

  Jeremiah crept in through the half-opened door and closed the door behind him. He wore a lab coat and stethoscope as camouflage.

  “Yes, darling,” he sneered, “I have a few words: slut . . . bitch . . . whore. Are you still going to choose that cripple over me?”

  Brenwyn’s stomach did a complete flip when she saw Jeremiah’s face, though she was not going to give him the satisfaction of acknowledging it.

  “You should not be here right now,” she warned.

  “Or what?” he asked jauntily. “You’ll strike me down with lightning? Cast a spell to call in my karmic debt?”

  “I will scream ‘rape.’ That should get you out of the way.”

  “Don’t be naïve,” Jeremiah said. “Which of the two of us would come out of that the better?”

  “You could always slide out of anything.” Throckmorton’s recounting of Jeremiah’s crimes reminded her of how futile dealing with him could be.

  Jeremiah crossed the room and sat dangerously close to her.

  “You know, it really is too bad about Marc. So pretty and now the doctors are afraid he’ll never walk again.” Jeremiah spoke as though they were discussing the weather.

  “No, Jeremiah.” She was not going to engage in this conversation. Not now.

  “After a few years in the chair, everything from the waist down will just wither away,” he continued. “What good will he be to you without his tight buns and ample manhood?”

  “What are you trying to get from me?” she asked as bluntly as possible.

  “Nothing, dear.” He shrugged affably, what would have been an endearing gesture in someone who was still human. “Just making small talk. A chat between old friends—old lovers—during your time of troubles.”

  Brenwyn grimaced in spite of her efforts at self-control.

  “Troubles you have caused.”

  “I wouldn’t have been forced to such extremes if you could have stayed out of this.”

  “Do not tell me any of this was my fault,” she warned.

  “You know what happens to those so dim as to put themselves in my way,” Jeremiah said. “If you had remembered your place, I’d have both of you and we would all be so much happier together.”

  Brenwyn stood and moved as far away from Jeremiah as practical in the tiny room.

  “Someone needs to put you in your place: someplace far, far away where you can no longer hurt anyone.”

  Jeremiah closed in on Brenwyn where she stood along the wall.

  “Perhaps, I should just be put out of my misery,” he murmured. “It is such anguish to see you and not have you.”

  “Good. You should suffer.”

  She crossed her arms in front of her breasts and backed away until she was in the back corner furthest from the door. Jeremiah followed right beside her. He leaned in and placed a hand on either side of her neck.

  “But you shouldn’t suffer because of me,” he whispered ardently. “Let me steal you away to a garden where I can kiss your tears away.”

  Lines like that had not worked on her since she was a teenager. It was embarrassing to hear them used now.

  “I am not taking you back,” she said. “Just leave now.”

  “I’m the one doing the taking, Maggie.” Jeremiah’s mouth twisted up into a cruel, lopsided grin.

  He pressed her body to the wall and pinned her shoulders with his hands. Brenwyn tried to protest, but he blocked her mouth with rough kisses. Again, she was reminded how much his lips were like the underside of a snail. He ran one hand up under her blouse to clutch a breast. That was the final insult.

  Her vision went red around the edges. A stream of power ran through her body as her emotions rose. Her hands practically hummed with it.

  Succumbing to years of rage, Brenwyn pushed Jeremiah away and slapped his face with all her weight behind it. Sparks flew as the blow landed.

  Jeremiah stepped back and brought a hand to his face. Brenwyn saw a partial handprint burned across his cheek. He smiled ferally at Brenwyn as she stared back, breathing heavily and barely in control of herself.

  “That’s more like it, dear,” he chirped. “Care for another go round?”

  All her thoughts of the Rule of Three went right out the tiny stained-glass window. All she wanted to do was to wipe that simpering expression off his face. She grabbed Jeremiah by his right wrist, twisting and driving him to his knees.

  “I said no!”

  Unbidden, the power from the Earth ran up her spine in a gout of spiritual fire she felt gather in a crown of flames around her head, just as when she invoked the Goddesses earlier that morning. It made reasoning beyond emotion all but impossible for her.

  Brenwyn held him down as Jeremiah gasped in pain. A sizzling sound escaped between her fingers.

  “What do I have to do to get through to you?” she asked through gritted teeth. “Hurt you? Crush you? Burn you?”

  Steam rose from Jeremiah’s wrist, and blisters formed beneath Brenwyn’s fingers. Jeremiah’s stifled scream finally broke through her fit of fury.

  Brenwyn released him and stepped back as he collapsed. She wrapped her arms around herself as she stared at the burned imprint of her own fingers on his wrist. The flesh was wet and red and still steamed.

  “Oh my God.”

  Jeremiah quickly regained some of his swagger, though his voice still sounded strained.

  “I always thought it odd when good pagans used that as a figure of speech,” he said unevenly.

  He held his wrist up before his face and inspected his burns matter-of-factly.

  “Very good work, my darling.” Jeremiah sounded almost proud. “Second-degree burns. Very—hmph—painful, too.”

  He winced as he twisted his hand.

  “Get away, Jeremiah.” Brenwyn just wanted to be left alone to curl up in some safe corner.

  “See how much easier it is doing things my way?” The pain was gone from his voice, though he still favored the arm. He was his usual smug, insouciant self.

  “Get away from me.”

  “You desire it,” Jeremiah continued. “You imagine it and it happens.”

  “Now, Jeremiah,” Brenwyn warned. “Go now.”

  “No restraints of morality or compassion, just unalloyed iron will.”

  Jeremiah nattered on as if he were in front of a lecture hall. From his tone you would never have known he had just tried to assault her and murder her lover.

  “Get out of here,” she shouted, “or I will hurt you again!”

  “I’m sure you would.” He smiled at the prospect.

  Jeremiah rose awkwardly to his feet without the use of his injured arm. At the door, he turned back to Brenwyn.

  “You have to be careful now, Maggie,” he said. “You can’t unbite the apple, you know. Imagine if you were to get all worked up with your hands on Marc. What could get burned off then?”

  “Out,” she said with as much menace as she could leverage into her voice and mind. “Now.”

  “Blessed be, darling.”

  Jeremiah waved cheerfully with his uninjured hand and slipped out the door.

  Brenwyn sat down on the nearest bench. Too drained to sit up on her own, she leaned over to one side, falling like a tree. She laid there with her cheek on the rough fabric for several moments. Then, her emotions overwhelmed her and her stomach threate
ned to turn itself inside out.

  She rushed out of the chapel while holding one hand over her mouth.

  Outside, Eleazar and Throckmorton were locked in intense conversation. The sergeant gestured angrily with a stethoscope in his one hand and Eleazar’s collar in the other. Brenwyn turned away from them and retreated to the women’s room across the hall, racing her stomach’s urge to purge itself.

  * * * * *

  Marc laid motionless in the hospital bed like a corpse. His eyes were partially open as if he were watching the ceiling through his lashes. A surgical steel halo rig, its points screwed into his skull, secured his head and neck like a gleaming crown of thorns. Hoses and wires connected him to a phalanx of monitors, pumps, and drainage bags.

  Brenwyn slipped into the chair beside the bed and sighed. She leaned forward out of the darkness and rested her chin and hand on the bedrail. With the other hand, she gently caressed his cheek using the back of her fingers.

  “Hello, my beloved. I told you I would take care of you.”

  She gently stroked his forehead while avoiding the stitched-up gash on one side.

  “Marc, while I truly appreciate your slaying dragons for me, you have to give it up.” Even though comatose, she was sure he would appreciate the humor. “They keep getting bigger every time, and I am afraid the next one will simply swallow you whole.”

  Brenwyn’s attention turned to Marc’s wounds: the bruised and swollen eye, the numerous cuts and gashes, the angry red flesh where the stainless steel spikes of the halo pierced his shaved skull. That was her only sense of him. Any spark of the man she loved was buried deep within this battered husk.

  “So much pain,” she murmured. “I am sorry he did this to you. I am sorry you ever met me—for your sake. If only I could punish him—get my hands on—”

  Brenwyn clenched her fists and screwed her face into a grimace of pain to hold back what was either the beginning of a crying jag or a scream of rage.

  The medical equipment responded to her emotional state. The monitors fluttered and blinked. Alarms went off in several places in the glassed-in bay and echoed from the nurses’ desk outside. Brenwyn pushed away from the bed and stood well away from Marc and his machinery. She tried to calm herself, to step away within her mind, but her emotions were like a runaway horse.

  The tinted glass door slid open and the duty nurse rushed in. Confusion and distress hung around the grey-haired woman like a cloud.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  Brenwyn had shadowed into the SICU without permission earlier, slipping around the attention of the doctors and nurses. Being caught here disabling Marc’s machinery, unintentional or not, set off a wave of terror in her.

  “I had to see—” Her breathing was coming too fast and erratically to allow her to finish her excuse.

  The duty nurse looked her over carefully, assessing her as a possible threat to the patient

  Both women were distracted as the main monitor over Marc’s bed spewed strings of random characters and then popped out like a burned-out light bulb.

  The nurse rushed to the wall and spoke into the intercom.

  “We’ve got a mechanical failure,” she said in a voice equal parts calm and urgency. “Need a replacement for the monitor ASAP for the multiple trauma in number seven.”

  She immediately fell to checking Marc’s electrodes. She spoke to Brenwyn without looking up:

  “You can’t be touching these things. They’re very delicate and it would be very dangerous if we don’t have readings on him.”

  Her tone and words were the same as she would use on an eight-year old, which was about how Brenwyn felt about her own abilities and maturity. She silently disappeared from the bay before the nurse had a chance to look up.

  * * * * *

  Brenwyn marched down the gravel berm of the road towards Arcanum. The footing was uneven and the lighting dim, but she forced herself to move on like a machine, chewing up the distance, constantly getting further and further from the hospital. As the skies darkened, a black cloud collected over her head.

  An old white van approached her from behind. She didn’t need to look to recognize it as the one shared by Stella and Musetta.

  As it caught up with Brenwyn, it slowed to match her pace and its passenger window rolled down. She ignored it, instead keeping her eyes on the horizon.

  “Hello, Bren,” Musetta said as she leaned out the window. “What are you doing?”

  “Walking home.”

  “You’ll make it in four days at this rate.”

  Brenwyn willed herself to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

  “I do not have anything better to do.”

  “What about Marc?” Musetta asked.

  Brenwyn did not want to talk about Marc. She did not want to think about Marc.

  “He needs you,” Musetta urged. “And you need him.”

  “He does not need me the way I am now.”

  “Of course he does. Now, get in the car.” Musetta waved her in. “We’re obstructing traffic.”

  “I would rather stay out here.”

  The cloud above her was growing darker to reflect her mood. It even started to spin a bit, as if threatening to spawn a tornado.

  “Punishing yourself won’t help Marc,” Musetta said. “Besides, there’s no room in Wicca for martyrs.”

  Brenwyn was working up a response, but was drowned out by the blaring horn of a passing truck. A battered red pick-up swerved around the van and gunned down the road. Its driver yelled at them through the open window.

  “Pull over or drive, you stupid bitch!”

  Brenwyn raised her hand as if to throw a stone. The power that had coiled inside her before rushed eagerly to her fingertips in hopes of finding a worthy target.

  What exactly would you shout, Brenwyn thought, if your head were on fire?

  “Don’t you dare, little girl!” Musetta scolded.

  Brenwyn snapped her head around and directed her anger at Musetta. Musetta’s face was a stern challenge, the expression of a mother who would no longer tolerate the antics of a spoiled child. Brenwyn considered scorching that look from her face for just a second, then the steel went out of her spine and she hung her head.

  The power of her raw emotions seeped down her spine and into the ground as she released it.

  “Oh God,” Brenwyn whispered. “Again, so soon.”

  The van stopped and Musetta stepped out to open the side door.

  “Get in, Bren,” she said. “We’ll talk on our way back to the hospital.”

  Brenwyn grimaced and sullenly complied, sitting behind Stella at the wheel. Musetta slid the door shut and sat beside Brenwyn on the bench seat. She covered Brenwyn’s hands with her own.

  Stella twisted around in the driver’s seat.

  “Welcome aboard,” she said with a broad, warm smile.

  The van made a U-turn and drove away.

  Stella looked out through the side window at the dark cloud which still followed them.

  “By the way, Bren, could you do something about that?”

  “I will try.”

  Brenwyn closed her eyes and focused on her breathing, thinking only of the eternal circle of air flowing in through her nose, down to the lowermost parts of her lungs and then up through her mouth. Slowly, incrementally, like water wearing away stone, the screaming inside her head was silenced. When she looked out the rear window, the dark cloud had broken up and scattered into vapor.

  Chapter 25

  The Sound of a Thrown Piano

  EVEN THOUGH HIS ARM STILL THROBBED and Brenwyn’s handprint burned bright red on his cheek, Jeremiah was positively chipper. His past few hours of hard work had quickly undone years of Auntie Musetta’s re-programming of Brenwyn. A little pain and anguish was definitely worth that.

  He heard a noise that took the shine off his mood. He turned down the Wagner on the CD player and rolled down his window to hear it more clearly. A familiar vibrato wh
istling grew louder as he neared his home.

  Jeremiah went up over the curb and came to a sudden stop on his own lawn. He was forced to do this because a part of his roof and cupola blocked the driveway.

  The Lexus’ engine still ran as Jeremiah leaped out. He came to a stop when he nearly tripped over his sleigh bed upside down in the lawn. The rest of his antique bedroom suite was in pieces nearby. He clutched his head as he surveyed the damage.

  Half the siding had been ripped off the house and there were gaping holes in the walls and roof. Every tree and bush on the property looked to be either trampled or ground to mulch. The whistling was deafening as the Qliphotic construct chewed apart the interior of his house.

  An antique roll-top desk flew out of an upper story window, followed by hundreds of pages from equally aged books.

  “No, no, no! This is not supposed to happen!”

  The frenetic whirl of activity inside continued, punctuated by the sound of a thrown piano.

  He tried to recall the proper exorcism for this thing he had raised, but he could only remember the most generic of incantations.

  “By the sacred names Adonai, Evoyah, and Aiel, I invoke . . .” After that, Jeremiah drew a blank. “Oh, damn it! Just go away!”

  The invisible creature burst through the roof and showered Jeremiah with splintered shingles and wood. It apparently leaped to the ground and stomped away; its path was marked by the destruction of Jeremiah’s porch, gazebo, and then the neighbor’s landscaping. After several seconds of crashing and the yowls of startled cats, there finally was silence.

  Jeremiah picked his way through the debris on the lawn to reach his front door. It came off its hinges in his hands. He tossed that to the side and stepped around his kitchen range to enter his home.

  As Jeremiah stepped into the foyer, he saw the chandelier embedded in one wall. Hundreds of its crystals were scattered across the floor. There were more potshards on the floor than the storage area for the University’s Archaeology department. Half of a settee hung from the twisted remains of the second-story banister.

  Jeremiah peered into the living room to see nothing intact in there larger than a shoebox. His upstairs bedroom had received the same brutal treatment; a ragged hole in the ceiling afforded him a clear view of the damage through a matching breach in the bedroom floor.