Bell, book, and murder

by Edghill, Rosemary

  Julian wore blue flannel pajamas to bed. Without socks. Ceremonial magicians are often ascetics.

  He picked up the lit candle from the table and carried it with him across the room to turn out the lamp. He set it on the tray-table and picked up two full glasses that were sitting on the tray-table beside a tiny decanter. He handed one of the glasses to me. I sat up to take it.

  "Skoal," Julian said, raising his glass.

  It was syrupy-sweet and full of herbs — somebody's home-

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  brewing—but as Julian'd drunk his, I followed suit. It was not the sort of vintage one allows to linger on the tongue; it had a nasty saccharine aftertaste, and one of the inclusions must have been Capsicum—red pepper to you—because I felt a rush of heat that went all the way to my toes as the liqueur hit my stomach. Warm at last, I burrowed under the covers again as Julian snuffed the candle with his fingertips and climbed in beside me.

  Some time later—it couldn't have been more than an hour or two, as it was still too dark to see —I came bolt awake, the way you sometimes do out of violent dreams you don't afterward remember. The only light in the room was coming from the desperate coils of the electric heater, cycling on again before the Ice Age actually arrived. It made just enough light to see that Julian was not in the bed, but standing beside it.

  1 closed my eyes and prepared to go back to sleep. Julian got back under the quilt and put his hand on my shoulder.

  The abrupt certainty of what 1 suddenly knew was about to happen jolted me with the pleasurable pain of an electric charge. I put my hand out and touched only skin, oiled with something spicy and ceremonial. The oil clung to my fingers. When he kissed me, the scent soaked into my skin. 1 could taste it.

  I helped him push my sweatpants off. Neither of us spoke.

  SATURDAY, OCTOBER 7—4:30 a.m

  The next time I woke up, the light was stronger. My sweatpants were shoved down to the foot of the mattress and my sweatshirt was bunched under my head. Julian was sound asleep beside me.

  I felt as though I'd been hit over the head, or had expected to die but been miraculously spared, or any number of things that paralyze the cognitive faculties. I slithered out from under the blankets, excruciatingly careful not to let cold air in, and gathered up my outdoor clothes by the thin wolf-light of false dawn.

  I was so girlishly rattled that I even went outside to dress. Although it wasn't that much colder out than in, the cold air was as immediate as a blow to the heart, and I sucked air and hissed as I struggled into jeans and parka. There was a stump a little way toward the lake and I sat on it to pull on last night's socks and boots. By then I could distract myself with the romance of being up with the dawn, something I actually see oftener than I'd really Uke.

  As the sun rises, it turns the sky first indigo, then blue. Any clouds take on a ridiculous set of Disney colors: purple, pink, yellow—even green. The tops of the trees, or mountains, or what-ever's highest, go to full color, while the ground is still shades of gray. After that the stages of the process are much less distinct, with areas of light and color slowly equalizing until all of a sudden you realize it's not dawn, but morning.

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  It was Still dawn when I walked down to the lake. The lake was covered with white mist in a low bank, blurring its boundaries. Across the lake and to my left I could see two dome tents, an orange one and a blue one, rising like strange giant mushrooms from the grass. The grass would be green later; right now it was still grayish with night and fog. Down here the air was even colder and wetter; I decided the lake hadn't been my destination.

  I turned right, following the lake around to where it dwindled into marsh. There was a wooden bridge spanning the disconsolate brown sludge; it was slippery with rime as I crossed over it. Across the meadow, the trail began that led up the hill and through a scrap of pinewood to another open space. When Hal-lowFest had the site nobody camped there.

  1 was panting by the time I reached it; there's a more gradual trail that starts behind the bam but I'd taken the direct route and it's a pretty steep climb. By the time I got there it was full day and I had no trouble avoiding the fire pit in the middle of the clearing.

  The fire pit is about four feet across and a foot deep, lined with brick and edged with big white stones. The reason nobody camps here is that we use this site for the Saturday Night Opening Ritual and for the Bardic Circle and Bonfire.

  I went over and looked at the fire pit. It was full of dead leaves, charcoal, condoms, and the odd beer bottle, but somebody would be coming up to clean it out and fill it with firewood later.

  I'd relaxed as soon as I'd gotten here, and it didn't take much to figure out why: Julian wouldn't be easily able to find me here, should he conceivably be looking. It was an irritating thought, and I couldn't face it right now; I hurried across the meadow and into the woods beyond as if I were following a ball of string through a labyrinth.

  The meadow with the Bardic Circle is at the edge of a pine forest bordered on the west by the access road into Paradise Lake and on the north by the houses that edge Gotham County 6. The bulk of Paradise Lake's acres lie east and south; this patch of woods is mostly a buffer zone, leading nowhere. Once I reached the edge I'd have to go back the way I came; due east out of the pine forest is a drop-off too steep for me or anyone else with brains to shinny down.

  I'd been walking fast, as if I had a destination in mind where there wasn't one, and the part of me that wasn't occupied in dithering had finally noticed that and was just getting around to questioning it when I saw . . .

  I could say its stillness caught my eye, but that would be ridiculous: I was surrounded by rocks and trees and neither one moves much. I could say it was the color, but the colors were browns and blacks, just like the autumn forest. I looked, basically, to reassure myself that it wasn't what my mind was telling me it was.

  But it was, and part of me wasn't surprised.

  There was a man Ijring on his back on the ground. The trees had kept me from seeing his hands and face until I was right up on him; for the rest, he was wearing brown corduroy pants and black shoes and a brown woolly coat. It was an outside coat, a winter coat, and his left hand was still in its glove. The right hand was curled among the pine needles, waxy-pale and diminished. The nails were blue.

  I knelt beside him on the forest floor and pulled open the unbuttoned coat. His eyes were closed and he might have been asleep, but I've seen dead people before, and I knew that he was dead, absent beyond any summoning back. The coat felt heavy; when I lifted it open, a gun slid out of the right-hand pocket and into the pine needles that covered the forest floor. It was, I decided tentatively, a .38 revolver. I didn't touch it. I hate guns. It comes of having had them pointed at me, I expect.

  In life John Doe had probably been the upstate version of a redneck: fat, fair, and fiftysomething, clean shaven and closely bar-bered. He was wearing a red plaid flannel shirt and a white V-neck T-shirt. The only thing that didn't quite fit this picture was the aggressive gold crucifix bearing a muscular silver Jesus that he had around his neck. It was all of three inches long and he'd worn it on a heavy chain that would make it dangle about midchest. It was currently flung back over one shoulder and resting among the pine needles, as if it had flipped back when he fell. Only by looking very closely could you see the brownish spot, about the size of a quarter, on the front of the flannel shirt at about the place Jesus would have hung.

  The shirt wasn't buttoned, which was odd. I pulled it open. There was a slightly larger spot on the none-too-clean T-shirt. The T-shirt wasn't tucked in, and a wedge of hairy bellyflesh showed at its hem. I eased the shirt up and looked.

  In the middle of John Doe's chest, level with his nipples or a little below, was a weird puncture wound. It wasn't red and it wasn't bleeding; it was black and almost dry. A quarter, or a fifty-cent piece at the very most, would have covered it completely.

  It wasn't a knife woun
d—which was to say, while he'd been

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  stabbed, as far as I could tell, it was with something that made three half-inch slashes that came together at almost right angles, like the center of a Mercedes-Benz hood ornament, or a radiation trefoil, or a peace sign with the bottom center stroke removed.

  I pulled the T-shirt back down, feeling sick. And then I felt even worse, because I realized that the fingers that had touched him to lift the T-shirt were oily. When 1 lifted them to my nose 1 could smell cinnamon, and when 1 looked at the dead man's face again, I could see that there was a shiny patch on his forehead, a little darker than his skin—but then, cinnamon anointing oil is a dark reddish-brown color.

  The marks on his T-shirt that I'd taken for poor laundry skills became blotches of reddish oil applied to the skin and now soaking into the cloth. I found myself staring fixedly at the white drops of resin oozing from the trunk of the pine tree he lay beneath, and then my focus shifted and I could see droplets of hardened cream-colored candle wax upon the fallen needles on the forest floor.

  No.

  I stood up and backed away, tripped over my own feet and crashed sideways into a tree hard enough to knock the wind out of me. I'd hit my head, too; the pain made my eyes tear and stopped me from doing something stupid. This was not a time for stupidity.

  There was a man lying dead in the forest, stabbed through the heart with . . . something.

  And sometime before or after he'd died, someone had anointed him with oil and burned candles at his head and feet. And this had happened in a campground already being filled by one of the biggest gatherings of Pagans, Wiccans, and magicians on the entire East Coast.

  I knelt beside the tree I'd run into and scrubbed my fingers dry in brown pine needles.

  There are things that you do when you find a dead person, and one of the important ones is to tell the police.

  I'm not one of those steely-eyed adventuresses out of prime-time fiction who stumbles through battle, murder, and sudden death without even mussing her hair, but by now I've had enough bad luck in my life that John Doe didn't leave me really rattled for long. After all, he was dead; how much more harm could he do?

  The walk back helped, too. On the way I thought to check my

  watch and realized it was barely six. I entertained the craven notion of not mentioning what I'd seen at all —it was entirely possible that no one else would go up that way all weekend —and a small irrational part of me was convinced that the whole thing was only a sick practical joke that I was the victim of, and that when I led someone else back up there, there'd be no one lying dead among the pines at all.

  I compromised with it by promising myself I'd tell Maiidjene. She ought to know, anyway, being the festival coordinator. And then she could go with me and the police so that even if I was going to look silly, I'd have moral support.

  I tried the door of Registration. It wasn't locked. I looked in and saw Bailey asleep in a pile of blankets, looking like a giant hedgehog. 1 closed the door again and went next door. The door there wasn't locked either.

  It was warmer in this cabin than it was either outside or in the cabin I'd shared with Julian, but then there were eight people here, crammed into a space roughly twelve feet by twelve. Fortunately, Maidjene was near the front. I nudged her with my foot; there wasn't room to kneel.

  "Wake up," I said, trying to keep my voice down. I kept poking her until her eyes opened. She blinked, then focused.

  "Come outside," I said. 'There's a situation." I retraced my steps over puppy-piled bodies and waited outside. Maidjene and I have known each other for a long time, even if she does live in Jersey. She joined me outside less than five minutes later.

  She hadn't bothered to undress from last night—rustic conditions encourage the layered look—and looked rumpled and wary and ready to be mad.

  "It's SLX-oh-fucking-niceness-clock in the morning. Bast," she snarled in a stage whisper. 'This had better be really exciting."

  "How excited are you by a dead body in the woods up above the Bardic Circle?" I snapped back.

  She stared at me; I could see she didn't believe it.

  'There is a dead body in the woods," I repeated more patiently. "We need to call the police."

  "You aren't making this up?" she said, after a long pause. I love the amount of trust I engender in my friends.

  "No. I saw him. He's really dead. Where's a phone?"

  Maidjene didn't move. "Who is it?" she said.

  It hadn't actually occurred to me until this moment to wonder.

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  "I don't know," I said slowly, thinking back. "I didn't recognize him. He was wearing a crucifix," I added, although that didn't automatically rule out his being an attendee of HallowFest.

  And he'd been ritually murdered — both in the criminological sense and, possibly, in a magical sense. I thought about that and didn't say anything.

  "Show me where it is," Maidjene said.

  "Jesus fuck me gently with a chainsaw," Maidjene breathed reverently ten minutes later, staring at John Doe from a safe distance. She didn't need to get close to see he was there, and the police were not going to be best pleased by this becoming a high-traffic area. Because there really was a dead man at HallowFest, and now Maidjene had seen him too.

  "We'd better tell Mrs. Cooper," Maidjene pronounced.

  "We'd better call the police," I said.

  In the end we had to do both, because although there was a pay phone on the outside of the bam, it didn't have a phone book. It only occurred to me later that I could just have dialed "Information," and later still that the reason for the lapse was that I felt like an outsider this far from Manhattan and was looking for allies before I confronted the Establishment.

  Helen Cooper owns and runs Paradise Lake and has been very tolerant of HallowFest's free-range hippie foibles over the years. She's a stout gray-haired lady somewhere in her seventies by now; she wasn't young even when we started coming here back in the early eighties. She lives year-round in the building at the entrance to the camp, a large rambling white clapboard house with a porch around three sides and a wooden sign out front that matches the one on the access road that says "Office."

  It was a quarter of seven when she answered the door, and by then I'd gone back to feeling twitched, certain that at any moment somebody else would trip over the dead man.

  I didn't think we'd wakened her, but Mrs. Cooper was still in her nightclothes. She looked at us through the old-fashioned green-painted wooden screen door. There was a silence. I realized Maidjene was letting me take the lead and hoped I looked more respectable than I felt.

  "We need to use your phone. We have to call the police. There's a problem," I said.

  "What kind of a problem?" Mrs. Cooper said.

  I suppose subconsciously I expected everyone to know in advance; every time I had to explain it bothered me.

  'There's a dead man up in your woods," 1 said, restraining myself from phrasing it "seems to be" with an effort. There was no seeming at all: there was a man and he was dead.

  "Just a minute —I'll go up with you and check," Mrs. Cooper said, starting to close the door.

  "Mrs. Cooper," I said sharply. I would have put my hand on the door but I'd have had to open the screen first. She stopped.

  "I saw him too," Maidjene said.

  "He really is dead," I said. "And we have to call the police now."

  It turned out to be the Sheriffs Department that we called, not the police. Maidjene and I stood in the dining room while Mrs. Cooper punched the quick-dial number on her kitchen phone. She spoke to someone named John and confided to him that "some girls" staying at the campground "thought they'd seen" a dead body in the woods. She assured "John" that we'd be here when the car arrived.

  "Car'U be here in about ten minutes," Mrs. Cooper said, coming back to the dining room. "I have to go get dressed. Would you like some coffee?"

  I would,
Maidjene wouldn't. Mrs. Cooper showed me where the coffee things were, and I doctored up a cup while Maidjene peered out the dining room window, for all the world as if she were Ma Barker waiting for the cops.

  'This," she said, "is going to be trouble."

  I shrugged. It'd already been trouble.

  "I can see it now," she went on mournfully, " 'Human Sacrifice at Satanic Sabbat.'"

  "Oh for gods' sake!" I snapped.

  Maidjene turned back to me. Her face was set. "You know damined well that's what they're going to say, and nothing we say is going to stop another—"

  "Witch hunt?" I suggested sarcastically. Maidjene snorted.

  She was right, though, especially if ... I stopped. There were too many variables to settle on one good paranoid conspiracy. Who was dead, and how had he died? Who had killed him, and why, and —

  Mrs. Cooper got back about the time the sheriffs car pulled up in front of the house. There were two deputies in it. The driver got

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  out and Mrs. Cooper was already opening the door before I realized the driver was a woman.

  She was wearing a pale tan Stetson that made me think of Texas marshals, a light shirt and dark pants and the rest of the usual paraphernalia: black leather belt and a truly enormous gun. Her badge looked oddly commonplace to me, and after a moment I realized why: Gotham County Sheriffs Office used a star-in-circle, just as Wiccans did, only their star was solid and had "Deputy Sheriff written across it. She came inside and walked straight over to me.

  "I'm Sergeant Pascoe," she said, holding out her hand. I shook hands with her; her grip was firm.