by Baker, Scott
I called Loren from a gas-station phone booth a little before seven to thank him again for having saved my life and for the offer of his spare bedroom, then told him I was feeling fully recovered and was already on the road to Boston but would phone and try to arrange to meet his wife and him for dinner the next time I was in Chicago.
I made sure I was totally coked while transferring the snakes the zoo in Boston wanted to their new cages. I kept only the baby cobra, the South American rattlesnakes whose cages concealed the coke, and a small shy rainbow boa of which I'd become somewhat fond over the years.
The snake-house keeper had originally been trained as a marine biologist and was far more interested in aquatic salamanders than in the snakes in his collection. As far as he was concerned any religious or devotional interest in serpents could be more than adequately explained in Freudian terms.
I remembered the way Dara and the baby cobra had stared in silent fascination at each other, remembered the subtle blue radiance the golden Naga she wore on her arm had taken on in the cave where we'd first made love. I remembered the golden Queen whose finger had become a striking cobra, a cobra whose bite had neutralized the coral snake's venom instantly, in a way no antivenin could have done, even if I'd had the immunity I'd told Loren I had.
I made it to Provincetown about three in the morning and parked my van in a lot just inside the city limits, where it wasn't likely to attract too much attention, then walked the rest of the way in. The bars were closed and Commercial Street, which in the daytime would have been packed almost solid with gays, tourists, college students, runaways and street vendors, plus the occasional Portuguese fisherman or high-school girl in her letter sweater, was almost deserted. The only people I saw were a few middle-aged gays still hanging around the benches in front of city hall—the Meatrack—and a young kid on some sort of overlarge Japanese motorcycle.
I passed Larry's two junk stores, his boutique, and Second Skin, the leather store with which he'd started, on the way to the bookstore over which he had his apartment.
We'd gotten to know each other at Stanford, where he'd been the graduate student in charge of my floor of the dorms, kept up our friendship when I transferred to Berkeley and he'd dropped out. He'd tried his hand first at painting, and then, more successfully, at leatherworking and handbag design, finally ending up working fourteen hours a day, seven days a week, keeping his shops together during the five-month season, then traveling and playing around with electronic sculpture the other seven months of the year.
Larry was my oldest and probably my best friend but I veiled the change in my eyes before taking the key to his back door out of its hiding place in the concealed zipper pocket in the doormat and letting myself in.
Both his Danes remembered me; I scratched them a bit behind the ears and under the neck before going upstairs.
He was in the front room, sitting at a computer console and playing some sort of game against three color television sets.
"Hi, Larry." He looked like a tired satyr, very Greek and bearded; he'd gotten a lot older in the three years since I'd last seen him.
"Hello, David." He stood up, hugged me. He was a lot taller than I was. "I'm sorry about Alexandra."
Which had a lot to do with why I like him: he and Alexandra had hated each other within minutes and yet he really was sorry.
"It's OK. It's not that important to me now." Which was an evasion but not an outright lie.
"Sit down." He flicked off the console. "Do you want something to drink or smoke or snort, maybe even something to eat if there's anything around?"
"No thanks. Not yet, anyway. Larry, has anybody come around looking for me or trying to get in touch with me?"
"No. Was somebody supposed to?"
"Not exactly, but—sort of. Nothing to do with the coke."
"About the coke. I'm not going to be able to buy it from you after all. A pound or so, maybe, but that's it. We're going to have a really bad season this year."
"You're sure?"
"Completely sure. Sales are already dragging way behind last year and the tourists we're getting don't even buy snow cones for their kids. A lot of people in town are going to go under before Labor Day."
"Are you one of them?"
"No. My junk shops'll keep me alive but you can only sell so many rubber chickens. At least and keep your self-respect. Which is getting harder and harder to do around here anyway. But I've lined somebody up to take the rest of the coke off your hands."
Which meant that there was at least one more chance that somebody was waiting here to contact me. "Anybody I know?"
"No. A friend of a friend, but he's not supposed to be into any sort of heavy-duty violence. Plus he'll be able to give you a lot better price than I could've."
"But you still want a pound for yourself?"
"If you still want to sell it to me. You can get more money for it from him."
"I'll give it to you. Free. No charge."
"You're kidding."
"No."
"How come?"
"I'm getting out of dealing just like I got out of snakes and you're having a bad year. A favor for a friend."
"You're sure? I mean, thanks, but I can't just accept—"
"I'm sure, and yes you can. Drop me off at my truck and then we can meet up at that little lake just off 6 to make the transfer."
There was a police car parked alongside the van, its right door open. One of the cops was shining a flashlight in through the van's side window while the other was radioing in his report.
"Fuck," Larry said, taking in the cobra's head and the lettering on the side of the truck. "You might at least have warned me."
"Sorry," I said. "Most of the time it just makes people want to leave me alone. And anyway, I've got the coke hidden where they'll never find it. In with the rattlesnakes."
"That's OK, then, but you still should have warned me.
Though I don't think we'll have any real trouble with them. I know both of them; they're local and since I'm a property owner and a year-round resident here now they'll probably give me a lot better treatment than they'd give you. This is still a small town in a lot of ways. Let me talk to them."
We got out of the car, moving slowly and keeping our hands in plain sight and away from our bodies until they recognized Larry. He said hello to them, shook their hands and introduced me to them, then said that I was his guest and would be staying with him, not sleeping in my van or doing anything similarly illegal.
Which turned out to be insufficient. They'd examined the truck's interior with their flashlights, seen the baby cobra and the rows of cages, heard the rattlesnakes rattling. And ever since a little girl had lost an eye and part of her face to an improperly trained attack dog the previous summer it was very, very against the law to bring any sort of dangerous animal into Provincetown.
Their report had already been radioed in and was undoubtedly on file not only in the local office but with all the other police stations and law-enforcement agencies they'd have contacted to get information on me and my truck. And while my ability to make myself unnoticeable would have gotten me out of the immediate situation, and would have made the fact that there'd be a report on file about me no more than a minor, if continuing, annoyance, Larry had no such abilities. Any major trouble with the local police, even a minor investigation, and he was through in Provincetown. So I had to find a way to convince the top cops that no crime of any sort had been committed, that the report that they'd radioed in had been mistaken, and convince them in such a way as to make sure the new information would go on file with their original report.
But it turned out to be easy, ridiculously easy, one of those problems whose solution comes to you as soon as you realize what exactly it is you need to get done. I told them that, yes, I was a dealer in poisonous snakes and that I had been carrying a load of poisonous snakes in the van, but that they'd all been delivered to the zoo in Boston and that what few snakes I still had were perfectly ha
rmless. I told them that they'd been mistaken in thinking the cobra was a cobra, that it was in fact a perfectly harmless garter snake just like the ones they sometimes saw in their own yards and gardens, and I invited them to inspect the glove compartment cage while I turned their attention away from all memory of having seen a cobra, away from the cobra plainly visible before their eyes, while I kept them from considering the possibility that what I was telling them might in any way conflict with what they thought and perceived and believed and remembered.
They radioed in their amended report, apologized to us for having inconvenienced us, then drove away.
"David," Larry said very slowly, his voice gone neutral in a way I'd never heard before, "you told me you were getting out of dealing just like you were getting out of snakes. All right. But what are you getting into?"
I started to turn his attention away, make him forget, keep him from being afraid of me. But I couldn't do it. He was the last real friend I had.
"Magic," I said. "I think. Or something like magic."
"You mean real magic. Sorcery and witchcraft, things like that?"
"Real magic."
He nodded very slowly, waited a moment, then asked, "Black magic?"
"No. Not me. But other people."
He let out the breath he'd been holding, nodded again. "All right. I believe you. I wouldn't have believed you, but—you couldn't see your eyes while you were telling them that the cobra was just a garter snake, David. That, and the way they just drove off—could you do that to me? Just tell me anything and make me believe it?"
"I'm not sure. That was the first time I ever tried it. But I think so."
"It's scary, David."
"I'm scared too, Larry. Very scared. But I'm as much your friend as I ever was and you can still trust me as much as you ever could. Let's get the coke out of the truck and back to your apartment and then I'll tell you all about it. I nee' to talk about it with somebody and you're the only one I can trust."
I started telling him about Dara while I weighed out his pound and he shaved down a rock on a piece of black glass so we could snort a few lines. I was still talking when the phone rang.
It was 6:00 a in He reached for the phone, picked it up, listened for a second, then handed it to me.
"Hello?"
"Hello, David." It was my brother's voice. "Hello, Michael. What do you want?"
"Father's dead. You're needed here at home."
"I've got some business to take care of."
"Drop it and get here as fast as you can. If our sister means anything to you."
Our sister? We didn't have a sister.
Unless—
Dara.
* * *
Chapter Thirteen
« ^ »
The family holding was a rough square of land four miles on a side. Like the surrounding countryside, most of it was flat prairie, but its center was a geologically unique deformation of the landscape resembling a lunar meteor crater. This was the heart of the estate. The rest of the land, despite its enormous potential value as farmland, had been left undeveloped and served only to insure the family its privacy.
Sometimes when a large meteor strikes the surface of the moon a crater with three distinct features is created. Circumscribing the crater is the ringwall, a circular wall of mountains splashed up by the meteor's impact. Inside this is the crater itself, and at the center of the crater is a single central mountain. At one time I must have been told why lunar meteor craters often had the central mountain and why earthly ones never did, but if so I have forgotten the explanation.. What impressed me as a child was how like a lunar crater my home was.
But if it was a crater, it was a fairy-tale crater. There was a great circular hole perhaps three hundred feet deep and a mile in diameter, surrounded by steep hills. The crater floor (I had thought of it as a crater ever since one of my early tutors had shown me a drawing of one such crater, though I had later been told repeatedly that the true explanation of our unique landscape had nothing to do with giant meteors) was thickly forested with maple and oak, elm and birch, but its walls were sheer rocky cliffs except in one place where the cliff wall had crumbled to form a gentle slope.
A steep central hill, a tiny mountain blunted by gravity, rose from the forest almost to the level of the surrounding plains. It was moist down on the crater floor, green with the scent of growing things, but as you climbed the central hill the trees and topsoil grew thinner until you found yourself climbing barren rock.
And it was there, on the bare rock, that my ancestors had chosen to build their house—or rather, their chateau, for though built almost entirely of native materials it was a European chateau in design and execution. Almost all its furnishings and fixtures had been brought from Europe, presumably traveling cross-country in covered wagons.
When the first other people of European descent arrived in the area more than one hundred and seventy-five years ago they found my family already established, their massive mansion complete and fully furnished, their life more that of cultured Europeans in Byronic seclusion than that of American pioneers. The first settler to happen upon the house had been met at the door by a servant, entertained, and then sent back to his sod hut.
Or so, at least, my father had told me, and the story was consistent with what I knew of our family's subsequent behavior. We had never mixed with the farmers who settled near us. Occasionally a Bathory would be seen in one of the small towns that grew up in the vicinity of the estate, occasionally some local official would visit the house on business. But such visits were rare, and discouraged.
I was a member of the seventh generation of Bathorys to be born in that house. My ancestors were buried in the graveyard at the base of the hill, under stone markers so set amongst the trees that one could not tell where the cemetery ended and the forest began. On each grave a shade-loving wild-rose bush of a type I had never seen elsewhere, with tiny roses mottled pink and white, had been planted, and the bushes had thrived and spread, adding to the confusion of cemetery and forest.
It was very beautiful there, the kind of picturesque landscape so many people dream of, and for. most of my life my greatest dream had been to escape from it forever, to know that I would never have to see it again.
I had thought I had achieved my dream and freed myself, that I would never have to return. And now I was returning.
"I've got to leave," I told Larry as I put the phone down. "Can you sell the coke for me, take care of everything? I'll phone you and tell you how to get the money to me as soon as I've got things straightened out."
"Sure, if you want me to, but do you have enough gas to make it to Hyannis? The station here won't be open for another half-hour or so and I'd like you to sit and talk a little longer before you get going. If you can. Just until the gas station's open."
I looked at him, saw that for him this was the last time, that he expected me to return—if I ever returned—as someone completely different, someone he didn't know and could never know.
"All right. Until the station opens."
"What happened? Was that the call you were waiting for?"
"I think so. That was my brother Michael calling to tell me my father's dead and that I've got to come home immediately if my sister means anything to me."
He started to say something, closed his mouth, finally said, "Dara's your sister?"
"Yes."
"You're sure?"
"I think so. Yes."
"David, you said she was nineteen or twenty years old. Right?"
I nodded, knowing what was coming.
"But you're twenty-nine years old and your mother died when you were two. We're old friends, David; I know all about you. So she can't be your sister unless she's a lot older than you say she is or unless she's a half sister of some sort—"
"I don't know, Larry. Maybe. Or maybe my mother didn't die when father said she did."
"But it doesn't make any difference to you that she's your sister? You're in l
ove with her anyway? I mean, romantic love? Incest?"
"Yes. It doesn't make any difference."
A slow nod. "All right. Then where's your father come into this? You said your brother told you he was dead?"
"Yes." I told him about my visions of the ice tunnels and of the man who was me and not-me.
"So your father was a… black magician who used you and Dara to wage some sort of war against another group of black magicians. What about your brother? Was he helping your father or was he part of the other group?"
"I don't know. If Dara's my sister, then Michael's got to be involved too, but—but then I don't really know who he is. I mean, I thought he was, you know, just a hypocrite, all smiling and friendly and honest outside but sort of small and greedy and trivial inside, just empty, but—"
"But now you don't know."
"No. What time is it, Larry?"
"Just after seven. You better get going."
"I'll be back as soon as I can, Larry. With Dara."
"All right, David. As soon as you can."
It was after midnight by the time I reached the family estate. The surrounding prairie was lit with no more than the faint silver phosphorescence I had come to expect in everything I saw but when I reached the top of the hill over which the road leading to the house passed I had to brake, stare.
The crater pulsed with silver fires and now that I was at the top of the hill, no longer shielded by it, I could feel the power pulling at me, shaking me, caressing me. How could I have grown up in the center of all that without having felt it?
But perhaps I had felt it, felt it without understanding what it was I was feeling, without knowing what it was that was making me so unhappy, had forced me to leave.
The road, freshly blacktopped, led down into the crater and through the forest. Every tree, every bush, gleamed with its own silver light. Fallen logs, night-flying birds, creepers and outcroppings of rock—everything shone. The power flowed around and through me, gentle, insistent, irresistible. Even the gravestones in the family cemetery gleamed soft and silvery. The wild-rose bushes burned like white-hot wire.