Bell, book, and murder

by Edghill, Rosemary

  Before I made it outside I heard jumbled scraps of talk behind me: "Who does she think she is?" "Jonathan, you dickface." "She's the one that found Jesus Jackson." "Asshole." "I didn't mean anything."

  Belle and Ironshadow were the ones who came out after me — not Lark. Ironshadow must have gone to get her. They put their

  arms around me to let me cry, but I couldn't. All 1 could do was quiver with trapped emotion and wish there was some barricade to clamber up onto.

  "It isn't right they should be glad he's dead," I finally managed to say. It wasn't what I meant; that was too lofty a moral high ground for even me to defend.

  'They're just assholes," Ironshadow rumbled soothingly.

  We were standing just outside the "front door" of the bam, the main entrance that nobody uses during a HallowFest because all the action's in the other direction. There was enough light spilling through the uncurtEiined windows for me to see Belle and Iron-shadow's faces, and to see a worried clump of people silhouetted in the open doorway. People who cared about me—or cared about something at least. Maybe just their own self-image.

  "I understand how you feel. Bast," Belle said. "It must have been very scary to be the one to find the body. Sometimes when something like that happens people feel responsible for the fact that it happened, and then, because they can't do anything about it, they get angry. But you're not responsible. Reverend Harm's death isn't anything to do with you."

  "No man is an island . . . any man's death diminishes me ..." Do not ask for whom the John Donne's, it tolls for thee. I shook my head, choking on the words I both wanted and didn't want to say. "You didn't see him," I finally managed, which wasn't what I meant, either.

  "It's over," Belle said firmly. "We have to bless it and let it go."

  "It isn't real to them," Ironshadow said. "You know that. It's just another TV show. That's why they're talking like that."

  "Cowboys and Indians," I said, drawing a deep, hurting breath. Pagans and Inquisitors. Choose sides, and let the dead not be real people, but merely a convenient way of keeping score.

  "That's right," Belle said, giving my back an encouraging pat. "You're upset, that's all. Nobody really wanted Reverend Harm dead."

  "Someone did, Belle," I pointed out. I stepped back, breathing deeply to center myself.

  'That is nothing to do with you," Belle said firmly. But it was, even if only to the extent that I had to hold an opinion about the morality of the death I'd discovered.

  "All right," I said. Belle took it as an agreement, but it wasn't. Not really.

  368 Bell, Book, and Murder

  They took me back inside; I got a lot of soothing mothering, and Lark even showed up and apologized, although neither of us was certain quite for what. He put his arm around me and I leaned back against him, both of us pretending it was ten years ago and none of the time between had happened.

  And then it was time for the Closing Ritual.

  The Closing (Opening) Ritual doesn't begin HallowFest in any practical sense, since it's scheduled to take place at a time when the majority of the attendees have arrived. It's the one event at which most of the Festival's attendees can usually be found —though not, as I've said, all. The parents of the very young often stay away (although children are welcome), as do those who don't fancy a long walk in the dark for reasons of health or hedonism. This year more people than usual elected to stay behind in the bam, at least as far as I could tell from my place in the procession.

  The ritual begins with the Closing Ritual that goes with the Opening Ritual of the previous year's HallowFest; closing the Festival just before opening it again (bad magical discipline though it is) is a conceit that helps us take the love and belonging we feel here with us through the secular year, as if in some sense we never leave this sacred ground.

  Most people change into ritual gear for the opening, and I'd even brought my robe to the Festival, but it was in the cabin and I didn't want to disturb Julian at whatever his private devotion was to retrieve it. I had on the silver cuff bracelet that marks my degree in my particular Wiccan tradition and the pentacle I always wore and that was sufficient.

  The flashlights people carried made brilliant erratic searchlights through the country night. It took maybe twenty minutes for all of us to reach the Bardic Circle, and members of Summerisle Coven were already there. They'd marked out the circle boundaries with battery-operated Coleman lanterns. The bonfire had been built sometime this afternoon and now stood ready, surrounded by carved and illuminated jack-o'-lanterns from the pumpkin-carving workshop I'd missed, flickering orange-gold with dancing candle flames. Even with fewer people than usual attending we made a large circle —possibly ninety people. Most of us knew what to expect from previous years. We waited.

  Enough different trads come to HallowFest each year that it would be exclusionary for whoever was running it to use the ritual form of any specific tradition at this circle, so we don't. The

  organizers of the last year's Festival begin by closing last year's circle, then this year's organizers open this year's circle. Then one of our youngest Pagans lights the fire. In practice, this means he or she will throw a bit of burnt branch saved from last year's fire onto the waiting woodpile, then retreat to safety while an adult lights it. As theater it's simple, effective, and healing, which is, I suppose, one of the reasons it's evolved the way it has.

  While the fire catches we go around the circle, making personal statements and introducing ourselves. Sometimes we make sacrifices to the flames—on the HallowFest bonfire one year I'd burned diaries and papers for Miriam Seabrook. I could see the ribbon-tied box that I'd tampered with earlier sitting at Maidjene's feet, and felt a guilty surge of relief. She'd bum it, and with it all evidence of what I'd done.

  Unless, of course, somebody told her afterward.

  Between them, the Coleman lanterns and the jack-o'-lanterns cast enough light that the yellow Crime Scene ribbons were visible at the edge of the clearing, an unwelcome reminder of reality. I could see the soon-to-be-fire in the fire pit: a stack of logs and split kindling almost three feet high, with a tinder-filled core for easy lighting.

  Bailey from Summerisle stood in for members of Brightstone Coven in Vermont, who'd run HallowFest last year and couldn't make it down this year. He read out a short closing statement from them and then stepped forward and tucked the rolled parchment in among the logs in the fire pit.

  Then Maidjene opened this year's HallowFest, while Sabine played "Banish Misfortune," an old Irish folk tune, on her flute. It was probably only my guilty conscience that made me feel Maidjene placed undue stress in her opening speech on HallowFest being "at a time out of time and a place out of the world, a sanctuary where hate and ugliness cannot enter."

  I wished it were true.

  This year Iduna carried the stick salvaged from last year's fire; she was wearing a light-colored robe that already had charcoal smears on the front and clutching Ragnar's finger as he led her up to the woodpile. There was a moment of negotiation before she'd let go and drop the branch into the kindling, and everyone clapped and cheered when she did. Ragnar picked her up and carried her back to the perimeter as she hid her face against his neck.

  On the sidelines, Ironshadow lit a torch. It was a real torch-wax-soaked rags wrapped around the end of a stick, and he flour-

  370 Bell, Book, and Murder

  ished it to make sure it caught before he handed it to another of Maidjene's coveners —Lome, I thought. He was wearing a Sum-merisle tabard and looked as young as Wyler Pascoe. I wondered if that meant I was getting old, or merely jaded.

  The people who'd brought drums or other rhythm instruments to the circle —and many had —began to strike them in time, falling quickly into synch. Lx)me matched his step to the beat, holding the flaring torch high over his head.

  It is at moments like these that the world seems to become truly real — as if the world that all of us occupy daily were truly, as so many theologians tell us, mer
ely a veil for some unknown, but more brilliant and resonant, truth. It is this sense of intense reality— what C. S. Lewis called "joy" —that brings us all to our varied spiritual paths, and its lack that drives us ever onward, seeking.

  Had Harm found this joy in serving his narrow and exclusion-ist God?

  The question jerked me back inside my skin and made me feel cold and uncomfortable —and joyless. Lome shoved the torch into a hole in the pyre, and as the kindling caught, the wood was illuminated from within like the Halloween pumpkins ringing the base of the fire pit. The drums, rattles, and tambourines exploded into an arrhythmic din, over which the sound of Rebel yells and wolf howls rang back from the surrounding trees. But the joy that others found, or seemed to find, here did me no good—I was cut off from it, trapped in my secular skin without the confidence in the Lady's presence that I'd come here to evoke.

  The ritual proceeded. We went around the circle, each of us saying our piece, whether coven affiliation, geographical location, or witty tag line.

  "I'm Brandy, and I'm from Summerisle."

  "I'm Carol from Boston, and this is my first HallowFest." ("Welcome, Carol!" we all shouted back.)

  'Treath and Dan, Endless Circle."

  "Pain is Truth! And I'm Xharina."

  "Ironshadow—and this sure isn't my first HallowFest." (Laughter. "Welcome, Ironshadow!" we shouted anyway.)

  And on around the circle. "I'm Bast," I said, when it was my turn. "I'm from Manhattan." And nothing else.

  By the time I spoke the fire was burning strongly.

  "For those who have yet to find us —let their voices not be silenced!"

  A woman I didn't know stepped forward and threw the tambourine she'd been plajdng onto the fire. The drumface of it had been elaborately paiinted, and knots of ribbons trailed from the frame. A collective gasp went up from all of us as it charred to black and then caught fire, and I thought again about Wyler Pas-coe, who wanted to see "the Witches."

  There were other gifts to the fire—someone's thesis; a photograph of a loved one who'd died since this time last year; even a papier-mache Barney the Dinosaur filled with incense. It flared strobe-bright before becoming a thick column of scented white smoke.

  Maidjene threw her box into the fire without sa)ang anything; its impact sent up a shower of sparks.

  The circle opened out away from the fire pit as the fire got hotter. Lots of people had brought instruments up with them; there was music going on, and singing; a jug of apple cider was passing and so was a box of cookies; everyone was settling into the familiar ur-ritual mindspace of a HallowFest Opening Ritual.

  Everyone but me. No matter how hard I tried to concentrate on the ritual, I kept looking up the hill as if I expected Hellfire Harm to come striding down it brandishing a flaming sword.

  Which was why I saw them.

  The flickering firelight made for tricky seeing; at first I put the movement among the trees down to that. But it wasn't. There were people in the woods, coming down through them. Toward us. They might even be from the Sheriffs Office; I didn't know. I did know that their being here meant something was wrong.

  We were making too much noise for a shout to carry, and half a lifetime's habit kept me from breaking across the circle to warn Maidjene. I grabbed the person next to me and pointed up the hill before stepping back to run deosil outside the circle's perimeter. As I ran I saw that one of the men was carrying a rifle.

  A mob of Pagans is no brighter than any other mob. If we'd stood our ground and kept our heads, everything might have been all right. But someone screamed and then everyone was screaming, yelling, running in all directions. I grabbed Maidjene to keep from being swept away with them.

  "Call the police!" Maidjene yelled in my ear.

  Assuming these weren't the police. I let go of her and ran blind, taking the shortcut down the hill, straiight toward the lake. Behind me I heard a gunshot.

  6

  ♦^ SATURDAY, OCTOBER 7 — 10:30 p.m. ^"-J^

  I slammed in one door of the bam. 'There's men with guns up at the circle! Call the police!" I ran out the other door, moving fast, blessing the Lady that through luck and miracle I wasn't wearing my ritual robe: black, wool-blend, and eight yards of material in the trailing skirt alone. I ran for Mrs. Cooper's house because I doubted the ability of any of the barn's inhabitamts to get the sheriffs deputies here as fast as she could, but 1 was gasping and winded by the time I jumped her front porch steps and banged on the door.

  "Police," I panted, as she opened the door.

  She let me inside. She was already on the phone—to the Sheriffs Office, as a matter of fact.

  "One of them's here now. Tod," she said into the receiver. She looked at me. "I heard shots."

  I'd forgotten how far sound carried in the country—she'd probably heard us howling, too. "Men with guns," I gasped. "Crashing the circle. Through the pine forest." My throat felt as if it had been blow-dried.

  "She says there are men up here with guns," Mrs. Cooper told the phone. There was a pause. *Tod Fulton, do I resemble an utter fool to your mind? Of course I'll stay here and let you take care of it. That's what you're paid for."

  She hung up the phone and came back to me. I was standing, bent over and blowing like a grampus who's just finished running the New York Marathon.

  "Are you all right?" she asked. Her voice was kind.

  I nodded, still puffing. My heart was a hard palpable thudding in my chest and my mouth tasted of salt and iron. I hadn't run that far that fast in years, and adrenaline—like magic —takes its toll.

  "Come sit down," Mrs. Cooper said. "You're . . . ?"

  "Bast," I said. "I've got to — "

  "You stay right here," Mrs. Cooper told me firmly. "No one needs you running around in the dark."

  It was good advice. Come to that, 1 really didn't want to go. 1 have the greatest respect for the power of a gun in the hands of an agitated lunatic. I'd faced one once, and it'd be fine with me if I never did again. I came and sat at Mrs. Cooper's kitchen table. She gave me brandied coffee and shortbread biscuits.

  As I was sitting there I saw a red/white/blue blaze flash by the windows, then a few seconds later heard a squib of siren as the car cleared the road ahead. The Gotham County Sheriffs Department had arrived.

  "John'll take care of things," Mrs. Cooper said.

  'They're going to love coming here twice in one day," I said.

  Mrs. Cooper laughed harshly. "More than that—I had them up here Friday in the pee em to toss Mr. Hellfire Jackson Harm out on his ear. I don't know what anyone else may have to say about it, but for my money. Reverend Harm's decease is the best thing that could have happened in all of Gotham County."

  Lx)ved everywhere he went, just as I'd thought. "Harm was up here Friday?" 1 asked.

  Mrs. Cooper sat down opposite me at the kitchen table and sipped her own spiked coffee. "Hellfire was up here every year before you people were due in, saying I should throw you all out on your ears. I said to him Friday—just like I do every year—'Just you tell me, Jackson Harm, where I'm going to get another party—in October, mind —to rent the whole campground for three-four days'—well! Being practical was not any of Jackson Harm's particular virtues, let me tell you; he never did have an answer to that one. But this year he outdid himself."

  I was burning to ask her how, but just then another police cruiser pulled up. This one stopped, and the doorbell rang.

  "Just you look at this and see what I mean," Mrs. Cooper told me, getting out other chair to answer it. She took a pamphlet out of a kitchen drawer and plunked it down in front of me, then went

  374 Bell, Book, and Murder

  off to tJie door. ^'That's what Mr. Harm was doing up here Friday," she shot back over her shoulder.

  I picked up the pamphlet. It was cheaply done: black and white, gatefold, probably just Xeroxed onto bond paper. It was typewritten, not typeset, and the columns rain crookedly up and down the page —a home paste-up job.


  "Satan's Handmaids!" the front page said, in large blurry letters. Press-type probably, or lifted from something else. There was a hand-drawn Christian cross inside a barred circle beneath the words.

  I skimmed it quickly, then read it more carefully as I realized that this wasn't just the standard sort of redneck godshouter rant, but one directed specifically at us.

  "You say that all gods are one god, but there is only One God, who is the Christ Jesus, who has Truely [sic] said: Thou Shalt Have No Other Gods Before Me ..."

  If this was an example of Harm's theology, he was on pretty shaky ground: the speaker in that particular case wasn't the son, but the father, and it was one of the commandments given to the prophet Moses.

  There was more. Our Goddess was no goddess, but the Scarlet Womein of Babylon (which, speaking from the purely anthropological viewpoint, which holds that the gods of the old religion become the devils of the new, was only true, but not in any way Harm would've liked); our souls would dwell in darkness because we preferred stones to the living bread of the Word; et cetera, et cetera, ad nauseam, und so wetter.

  I could not imagine anyone at HallowFest being converted by this little tract: amused, yes, offended, possibly. It would offend most of the Christians of my acquaintance, come to that. The strangest thing about it was that apparently Harm meant this offensive little morsel of liberation theology to have a positive effect.

  I folded the pamphlet back together. The back flap was an invitation—with map —for HallowFesters to join his Sunday Morning Rescue Prayer Service and be welcomed again into the whole body of Jesus Christ, a process which sounded mildly cannibalistic, to say the least.

  While I'd been reading I'd been half-listening to what was going on in the background: Mrs. Cooper's voice interspersed with a male voice I didn't recognize. Now both of them came into the kitchen.