by Gwenda Bond
Chief Rawling touched the pale skin of his wife's cheek, relief clear when chalky powder came away on his finger. His attention darted between Phillips and Miranda, taking in the smears of powder on their shirts and skin. He pointed to a small storage shed at the edge of the yard. "Bring her over here."
But he swooped in to carry her, lifting her easily. They followed him to the scant cover the shed afforded. Phillips didn't wait for a better chance to bargain. "Dad, we have to get out of here. I think… we need to take her with us."
The chief asked, "What happened? No, there's no time for that. What are you going to do for her that I can't?"
Sara's peaceful face was tucked in to Chief Rawling's chest, like a fairytale princess sleeping under some devil's enchantment.
The devil in me. Or the wicked witch.
"I'm going to take her to Dr Roswell's," Phillips said, "while we figure out how to stop what's going on. All this–" he nodded at his mother "–has to do with the missing people. You brought me here because the island needed me. I'm here. And I'm telling you there are things going on that do not follow your laws. Things that can't be explained."
The chief looked down at Sara's face. He said, "She parked my car in your usual spot – I won't report it missing. But you find a way to get me updates." His fingers raked across her hair, smoothing the powered strands back with a tender care that stole Miranda's breath. "I wish my mother was still here. She could fix this."
Miranda remembered the conversation she'd eavesdropped on the other night, and what Phillips' grandmother had written in the letter about her son's unwillingness to believe, his inability to understand.
"Dad, what convinced you?" Phillips' surprise was plain.
The chief looked at Miranda. "I saw the new and improved Hank Blackwood earlier."
Miranda chilled. The man wearing her dad's body wasn't bothering to hide his wrongness. And, of course, the chief would have recognised him even if nobody else did, after all the time he'd spent as her dad's personal police caretaker.
A woman not so far away shouted "Chief Rawling!" and the chief said, "Give me two minutes to get their attention elsewhere and then get out of here. Phillips, I know you'll help her. Do what you can to help us all."
Phillips took custody of his mother from his father's cradle hold. His dad left them at a fast stride, disappearing around the side of the gardening shed. Miranda nearly closed her eyes at the way Phillips was looking at her over his unconscious mother. His sympathy was plain.
"You didn't mean to," he said. "It was an accident."
She hadn't meant to. But there had been a terrible moment right after the shot when she'd felt two things in equal measure. The first was hers, her shock at Sara lying on the floor. The second was a gloating sense that she'd accomplished a goal. That wasn't hers, but she'd felt it all the same.
She'd betrayed Phillips and Sara. She'd betrayed herself.
The letter was right.
When they reached Roswell's house, the driveway was vacant and the windows dark. By all appearances, no one was home. Roswell could be anywhere – in town eating dinner, doing interviews about the townspeople's miraculous return, roaming around Fort Raleigh working on his theory. Phillips looked into the backseat, where Miranda held his mom's head in her lap.
The voices in his head were a storm, but they weren't helping, no matter what his gram's letter said. They were distracting him, making it harder to figure out what he should do. When the adrenaline wore off, he'd be exhausted. The effort of keeping the voices back was too much.
"She's no better," Miranda said. She sighed, and then said, "I think you should let me leave you here and take the car back out to the Grove. You're better off on your own."
He turned off the car and got out, clicking Miranda's door open and leaning down to talk to her. He wouldn't let her get away with telling the back of his head. That made it too easy to run.
"Sidekick will be fine. We need to help Mom now."
He reached out to touch his mother's hair. He didn't know what he'd do without her.
"You're right. She has to be your priority, and you seem to be forgetting that I shot her. Phillips, you were right. What you asked back there… How could I do that?"
"It's not going to be that easy," he said.
Miranda frowned. "What?"
"Getting rid of me." He held up a hand to stop her from objecting. "When this is over and both my mom and you are safe, then you can get rid of me. OK?"
Miranda said nothing, which wasn't a no. A sudden gust of wind buffeted him hard enough that he pitched forward on his toes. A shadow fell over him. The voices prattled and he made out a word repeated in many of them Look look LOOK–
"At what?" he said, without meaning to.
"The birds," Miranda answered.
Above them, the sky filled with a wheeling mass of uneven shapes. The frantic noise of their beating wings and screamed calls filled the air. Miranda slipped from under his mother, placing her head gingerly on the seat.
He noticed Miranda brush at her hair, in what looked like a reflex. "Did this happen before?"
"No."
A few birds swooped lower, and the cries from the mass were like those of warriors in battle, the frenzy of their flight causing some of them to injure others. A small bird dropped from the sky to the ground a few feet away. In death, its dingy brown feathers drooped like autumn leaves clinging to a limb. Its eye stared at nothing, a tiny unseeing bead on an invisible necklace.
"They're so frightened," Miranda said.
"Something's making them panic," he said. The response of the voices confirmed it. Their chatter was of agreement. The mass of birds was already heading off, but he shut the door to leave his mom safe inside the car and said, "Come on. Let's get the door open, and then I'll come back for her."
Miranda looked a question to him, but followed as one last sad shape fell to earth.
No one answered his knock, and Dr Roswell's security turned out to be a laugh – Phillips managed to get past the front door lock with an ATM card and fifteen seconds. Old style locks like this barely existed anymore.
The house was dark, empty. "They're not here," he said.
Miranda called out anyway. "Bone? Doctor?"
No answer. Phillips turned to Miranda, and brushed the hair off her cheek. If he could just make the serpent under his fingertips disappear… What if his mother turned out to be right? What if he'd finally run up against a problem he couldn't outrun or outsmart?
"You would never have hurt her on purpose. I know that much." He dropped his finger to her lips. "Shhh. We'll figure out how to fix it."
The protest in her eyes was clear. She wanted to pay for what she'd done.
He dropped his hand. "But why was it different this time? Why the white dust?"
Where had all that powder come from? There'd been way too much for the gun to hold, especially having been emptied once already and not reloaded with anything. What sort of weapon behaved differently at different times? He wasn't sure what the white dust was, but it wasn't the sulphur and charcoal that had coated him before. Chalk and something else…
He went on, thinking out loud, "And why did it put her into a coma–" Miranda's eyes widened "–or a trance or whatever. Even a magic gun should be a little predictable."
Miranda finally spoke. "What's different now than the first time I shot it?"
What isn't? He intended to give her some answer, but she was nodding.
"The difference is that they're here," she said. "They're back. My dad – or Dee, the devil – he's back."
It was as good a theory as any. "Doesn't tell us how to wake up Mom though."
"Maybe there'll be something in Roswell's papers. I'll get started." She crossed the living room, pulling up the hatch that led to the library. "Go get your mom," she said.
And she was gone, feet thumping down the ladder.
• • • •
Miranda paused next to the table and chair where
Roswell sat on their first visit. The book he'd shown them before lay open on the table.
It was turned to the page featuring John Dee's portrait. He was a perfect specimen of the kind of noble the actors in Queen Elizabeth's court at the theater were made to resemble. He had a thin face framed by a high collar. A flush of color lit his cheeks in the portrait, pinched spots like the waxy skin of cherries. His eyes stared up at her, two black beetles about to crawl off the page.
Maybe not the devil, but definitely a devil.
The monas hieroglyphica mocked her from beneath him. In addition to the name and the fact that it was Dee's personal mark, the text said that the design represented the "unity of the cosmos," each part standing in for the moon, the sun, or the elements.
She closed the book, and moved on to search Roswell's desk. Her neck warmed like someone was behind her, watching her. But the house was deserted, and Phillips would be down any second.
Behind the desk, she turned to face the room. Empty.
You're alone – alone with Roswell's fire hazard. The doctor's desk was a mess of stacks and volumes and handwritten notes covering pages and pages, some lined and some not. On the ones that weren't lined, sometimes there were diagrams and drawings, lines with arrows at the end, or circles. They made no sense to her, the content of his research notes as jumbled as the material heaped before her.
There was one tidy spot, at the exact center of the desk. A single oversized journal with a weathered brown leather cover had been placed directly in front of Roswell's chair. It must be more important than the rest. She picked it up and saw that its brass clasp was similar to the one on the box that housed Dee's gun. Interesting.
She added another couple of legal pads and books to make a pile in her arms, just in case the journal wasn't the jackpot she wanted it to be. Then she selected a spot and sprawled on the floor, setting the notebooks and research materials in a semicircle around her. Her fingers traced the leather book's cover, the surface cool and smooth. She reached up and scratched the snake, which suddenly itched like a bug bite.
Snapping open the clasp, she flipped open Roswell's journal.
The man was insane.
She touched the page, wanting to press down the contents and keep them contained.
Heavy globs of ink formed scribbled out sections, bleeding into a sketch of John Dee. And notes. Lots of notes. "The key to their return?" bumped up against "The alchemist's promise." Names, including her ancestor Mary Blackwood's – small and circled, included in a short list of others. An arrow extended from the list titled 'Presumed Dead.' The words SLEEPING POWER were written at the side of the sheet in all caps, circled in a repeated spiral.
Above her, Miranda heard movement. What would Phillips make of the madman's scrapbook before her? She knew he respected Roswell, but this guy seriously needed a new hobby. It was no surprise that Bone was such a tool.
She turned the page, noting that he'd pasted in some of John White's paintings. Heavy ink highlighted some sections of the art, with notes written messily beneath. A sketch of a Native American hunter from the period apparently concealed a message that Roswell translated into: "The promised land was to belong to him. Become the New London. The home of the Great Work." The next page featured the detail of a flower, and the legend, "The boundary once crossed permits only one return. All must be in readiness."
" 'Only one return' too many," she said.
Flicking past a few more pages, she caught photocopied reproductions of letters with words underlined – weapon, prepare, bloodline – and then another page with two words connected by an arrow:
Weapon ——> Immortality.
She advanced another page, and saw the one facing it was blank. This was the last page Roswell had used.
Phillips thumped down the ladder. She didn't look up until he spoke.
"That took forever…" he said. "I don't want you to think I don't work out, but well, who has the time?"
He was giving her a little smile. He was playing the normal game. She often played the normal game in her regular life. The one where you pretended your day was fine, that whatever happened didn't solidify your freak status.
Peering over her shoulder, he said, "Whoa."
"Nice surfer impression, dude," she said. The normal game only worked if other people played along. No one ever had for her.
"Is that–" Phillips' expression darkened.
"Yeah." Miranda wished she could calm the frak down. "It's me."
The sketch gazed up at them, rendered in Roswell's tooheavy hand, her eyes enormous and black, the snake mark circled on her cheek. The birthmark was more detailed than her features, and for that she was almost grateful. Almost.
But being grateful was impossible, given the words beside the arrow that extended from the side of her face:
THE CURSE SURVIVES.
22
Keys
Phillips sat in Roswell's chair, trying his hardest to decipher the meaning of the scrawls and artwork in the doctor's journal. He flipped through the book again, the sequence not making much sense to him. These were the questions – and some of the answers – that had surfaced in Roswell's research. But the notes weren't left for someone else to read. They were the doctor's notes for himself. Phillips didn't know his shorthand.
What he did know was that Roswell clearly had a better view of how the pieces of Roanoke Island's weird history fit together than they did.
"No matter how many times you look, it's still crazy," Miranda said. "We should get out of here. Just bring it with us."
"He's not crazy – this is his life's work. An obsession, but he's not crazy. I don't think."
Miranda was perched in the stiff leather chair beside the little table. She wasn't looking at Phillips, but at the jeweled gun. Her hands turned it over and over again, as she examined its mechanisms with steady, competent deliberation.
She peered down its barrel, and his heart pounded. "Miranda, what are you doing?"
Her focus on the twisted, hammered metal was complete. "This equals immortality. I'm trying to see how it works."
Phillips would never have spent time dissecting the firearm. He was better with books, with messes people made with their minds. His ancestors and whatever random spirits were around babbled, but he could have sworn they were talking to each other and not him. He pressed them to the back of his awareness anyway, so he could think.
"I don't get it," Phillips said. When Miranda frowned a question, he clarified, "Immortality."
She held the gun closer to the lamp on the table, a gem on the grip flashing under the light from the bulb. "What do you mean?"
"It's such a bad idea. If everyone lives forever – well, just imagine it. Imagine if every person lived forever. For that matter, add every creature." Phillips was aware of the fact he'd never talked to anyone like this, not even Roswell, without wondering whether they'd think he was nuts. "The earth would be overrun. We'd run out of resources to deal with it in a blink of geological time. And then you get all the doom and gloom. Rationing, wars, etcetera."
"Etcetera?" Miranda half-smiled, but she was completely serious when she looked over at him. "I understand it – sort of. It's not about living forever. It's about not dying. To be able to keep the people you love around forever? I understand that."
She shrugged and frowned at the trigger, rubbing her thumb across the hammered metal.
From what Phillips understood of Roswell's journal, love wasn't any part of Dee's motives. The alchemist had identified the North Carolina coast as a place he could experiment on his band of witches and attempt to turn himself – and them – immortal using the weapon he made. If that worked, then the island was to be his launching ground to lash out at the world, to take down the queen herself. When his plan went south, disrupted, Dee and White hid the messages Roswell had teased out of the paintings and letters. Roswell had a number of White's personal letters to Dee, but only a few replies from the alchemist-in-chief.
M
ost people agreed that Sir Walter Raleigh and Queen Elizabeth had been a not-so-secret couple. Watching Miranda, Phillips decided Raleigh wouldn't have liked Dee going after his girlfriend's empire. Raleigh must have been Dee's unknowing pawn all along.
The page under Phillips' hand featured a sketch of a doorway surrounded by trees, bald cypress trunks like fingers reaching out of the ground. According to Roswell's handwriting scrawled around the image, Dee had given the settlers – the ones who "followed him true and were promised" – detailed instructions for traveling past the veil of reality to the place of spirits. There, they could wait as long as they had to for someone to reassemble the plan, to bring them back and complete Dee's agenda. Their lives beyond were tied to the island, not so different than Phillips' and Miranda's own.