by Rose, M. J.
“It’s dangerous to go there tonight. The tides are rising,” she warned.
“I know.” He smoothed her hair off her forehead. Her skin was damp. How long until he could lie with her again?
“I’ve been going to the caves since before we were together. Why are you anxious?” he asked.
She shrugged.
“Why?”
“The herbs were bitter today.”
He knew how she interpreted the signs: when certain herbs were brewed and turned bitter, she foresaw doom.
Gwenore started to shiver. Strong breezes were coming off the sea.
“Winds of change,” she muttered.
It had been fifteen years since their tribe had faced a threat this bad. Fifteen years since the battle in which his brother died.
“At least Brice won’t have to fight,” he said to his wife. “At least you don’t have to fear that.”
As he listened to the sounds of Brice carving his totem, bringing his magic to life, Owain leaned down and kissed Gwenore on her damp forehead. “It’s time for me to go, to pray, to chant and receive the visions so we can prepare for the future. Will you walk down to the sea with me?”
Twenty-two
Jac didn’t tell Theo about the scene that had just played out in her mind. First, she needed to understand it herself.
In Paris this past summer, she’d had several hallucinations over a week’s period, all triggered by a certain scent. Had she just stumbled on another scent that would induce visions?
The Paris reveries had progressively told a story that seemed so plausible. There were so many details that fit in perfectly. But the mind could do that. It did it in dreams, didn’t it? In the fantasy that had just played out, her mind had inserted the Celtic ring she’d seen in the Metropolitan Museum.
But over the summer, she’d always felt as if she were the person she was watching. That the images and the feelings were part of her. Not this time. Jac had been seeing the scene through a strange man’s eyes. Been inside his mind, but she wasn’t him. Wasn’t any part of him.
“Jac? Are you all right?” Theo asked.
“Yes. Why?”
“You were just staring off into space. I said your name twice.”
“Sorry, just lost in thought. I was trying to remember what I’d read about amber. I think that’s what the bits of stone you just burnt are. It has some curious properties. Farmers actually burn it to make fruit grow faster. But I’m not sure what else it can do.” She looked closely at the pyre. Rooted around in it with a stick. Pushing aside burnt twigs, lumps of coal and charred pine cones, she found more of the bits of brownish stones.
“This looks like a ritual fire. But it can’t be from Celtic times. It can’t be that old.”
“No, Wiccans still use these sites.”
“Reenacting Celtic ceremonies?”
“So my aunt Eva says. She learned to weave from one woman who practiced Wicca. She’s got endless stories if you’re interested.”
“I’d love to hear them.”
“Why don’t you come back to the house with me? You can stay for dinner. She asked me to invite you when I left this morning and I forgot.”
• • •
Minerva was sitting on the couch in the great room reading a book, taking occasional sips of something tawny from a glass. Eva was at her loom, weaving the marvelous blue-green cloth.
They both looked up when Jac and Theo came in.
The two sisters were alike in many ways: both had fine skin with a minimum of wrinkles and cornflower-blue eyes. But Eva was more like a delicate bouquet of lily of the valley in a antique porcelain pitcher, while Minerva was a dozen long-stem bold, black-red roses in a rock crystal vase.
“Help yourself to drinks,” Minerva said.
“A martini?” Theo asked Jac.
“Vodka and tonic if you have it, please.”
Theo walked over to the bar.
“Did you two have any luck today?” Minerva asked.
Theo filled his aunts in on the afternoon as he made drinks.
“This is a doomed exercise. Didn’t you learn anything from your grandfather?” Eva said. “There are too many caves. Too many ruins. Too much time has passed. You need to—”
“Eva, all those things are true, but nothing is impossible,” Minerva interrupted.
“You and all your possibilities.”
Jac had sat down on the couch opposite Minerva and was rifling though a book she’d found on the coffee table. The Red Book was a facsimile of Carl Jung’s famous journal containing his mandala drawings from 1914 to 1930. He’d undertaken the project to explore his own unconscious. She was studying the intricately detailed illuminations when she thought of something. If there had been one clue about the hidden journal in the library, perhaps there was another.
“Are the books in the library catalogued?” Jac asked.
“Yes.” Minerva answered first. “And the catalogue goes back to the mid-nineteenth century. The bulk of the titles were amassed by our great-grandfather. He bought up everything he could on the occult, magic, witches and mythology.”
“He was the one involved with the Phoenix Society?” Jac asked.
Minerva nodded. “He wrote a few monographs about the most important spiritualists of the time.” She rattled off a few names, several of which were vaguely familiar to Jac. “He infused our grandfather Henri with the same interests. When Henri was a boy, he attended his father’s séances, here in the house, he used to tell us how people sometimes came from as far away as London to attend. When we were children he experimented with—”
“Please, Minerva,” Eva interrupted. Her voice, usually so sweet, was suddenly tense.
“What kind of experiments?” Theo asked. “I’ve never heard about this.”
“It’s ancient history,” Minerva said, then looked at her sister, but Eva had turned away and was facing the window.
“Is it a secret?” he asked.
“It’s not a secret so much as something . . . your Aunt Eva has always preferred we don’t talk about it. But Eva . . .” She looked back at her. “Seventy years have passed.”
Theo got up and went over to his aunt Eva. He pulled a chair up to the loom, close to her, and then took her hand and held it gently. “I’d like to know what happened. Especially if it’s something that hurt you.”
Eva took a sip of her drink and then stared into the liquid for a moment. Sighing, she lowered the glass onto the side table, picked up her spindle, held on to it with both her hands as if it were ballast and began to talk.
“Our grandfather believed that children were more sensitive to spirits than adults. That we were more closely connected to the world we’d just come from—the world of souls: some recently dead, some dead for longer—all waiting to be reborn.”
“Not unlike Jung’s theory of a collective unconscious,” Minerva added.
“You connect everything back to Jung,” Eva said, as if even bringing up the unconscious were blasphemous.
Minerva laughed. “Because everything connects back to it.” She smoothed the fabric of her long red skirt over her knees. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
“Our father was a banker,” Eva said. “Uninterested in the world outside the bank.” She looked at Theo and exchanged a look with him that Jac wasn’t sure she understood but guessed had something to do with his brother. “He spent more than half his time in London. Long stretches when our grandfather was the only male in the house. Long stretches when he supervised us. Our mother was here of course, but she seemed happy to let our grandfather oversee a large part of our activities,” Eva said, and then stopped. She picked up her glass again. Took a sip of her drink. Then another. “Is it really necessary to do this?” she asked Minerva. “There’s nothing to come of it.”
“Theo wants to know. I’ll tell him, all right?”
“Would it matter if I said I’d prefer you not to?”
“Yes, I said that if you re
ally didn’t want me to—”
Eva interrupted this time. “But you’re a stone turner. And this one hasn’t been moved in decades. You said that yourself. I know you. You’ll just hound me until I say it’s all right, so just go ahead.”
“It was exciting to be included in our grandfather’s world,” Minerva said, picking up where her sister left off. But whereas Eva’s voice had been full of trepidation, Minerva’s was unfaltering and almost excited. “It made us feel special. We did things none of the adults in the house knew about. Magical things. He said they were our secrets. Between him and us and no one else.”
“What things?” Theo asked.
“We had midnight séances with a Ouija board while everyone else in the house was sleeping. Grandfather Henri said we were more receptive than any adults he’d ever worked with. It was heady praise. He needed us, flattered us, and we were his for the taking.”
“Did the séances work?” Jac asked.
“Oh yes. We’d receive messages from . . .” Minerva waved her arms wide, encompassing the sea outside the window. “From whoever was out there who wanted to communicate with us.”
“But people just push the little marker around, spelling out words,” Theo said. “You don’t believe spirits were really talking to you, do you?”
“Spirits like ghosts, no, of course not. But we tapped into some kind of force,” Minerva said. “I know as well as anyone how the unconscious influences us in ways we are aware of and others that are still a mystery to the most brilliant brain researchers. Thought can power movement. I was six. Eva was eight. We simply weren’t capable of spelling out the messages that came through on those nights. That was what was so exceptional about what happened.”
“But your grandfather knew how to spell multisyllabic words and write complex sentences, right?” Theo asked, suspiciously.
“His hands never touched the board,” Minerva said, as if she were that six-year-old again, full of wonder. “Only we children had our fingers on the pointer,” she explained. “Grandfather was in charge of writing down the letters the pin stopped on. He saved all the transcripts from our sessions.”
“Do they still exist?” Theo asked.
Minerva nodded. “They do.” She turned and looked over at the ornately carved credenza in the corner. “If you want to read them—” She stopped speaking suddenly.
“What is it?” Eva said nervously.
“I can’t believe I didn’t remember this before.” She looked at Theo. “Old age is a cruel master. Theo, what was the name of the spirit Hugo wrote about in the letter in the book of poetry?”
“The Shadow of the Sepulcher.”
“That’s what I thought.” Minerva looked at Eva. “You don’t remember either?”
“What?” Eva asked, as if she had no idea.
But Jac thought she saw the truth flicker across Eva’s face. As if she had remembered something but it had exacerbated her discomfort.
“Eva, what was the name of the spirit we talked to?” Minerva asked.
She shook her head. “I don’t know. It was so long ago.”
Jac was sure that Eva was lying. Why couldn’t Minerva see it too? Or did she and was just acting as if she didn’t, drawing her sister out this way for reasons of her own?
“The spirit we talked to was named the Shadow of the Tomb, wasn’t it?” Minerva asked.
“I thought he was just called the Shadow. Like the radio character.”
Minerva shook her head, then turned to Theo. “I’m sure of it. The spirit we talked to when we were children had a name. He called himself the Shadow of the Tomb.”
“Did my grandfather know that?” Theo asked.
“By the time our brother was born, our grandfather had died and we never played with the Ouija board again. But I can’t believe I didn’t make the connection when Alexander showed me the letter. Or that you didn’t,” she said to Eva.
“Theo, you shouldn’t be getting mixed up in this, that’s all there is to it.”
“Eva, everything will be fine,” Minerva said. “It’s a good thing to release this ghost.”
Eva shook her head. “It’s never a good thing to release a ghost.”
“You know there’s a possibility,” Jac said, more to Eva than Minerva, wanting to reassure the elderly woman, “that your grandfather found the Hugo letter and, knowing the name of the spirit, told you that’s who you were talking to. It’s even possible that the board never spelled out that name at all, but he guessed that name based on what he’d read, and you only think you wrote it out.”
“Very clever of you,” Eva said, shaking her head. “I think that’s exactly what happened.”
“Ah, so you are a skeptic,” Minerva said to Jac. “I’m surprised, given your interests.”
“My skepticism is why I wrote my book, and what the TV show is based on. I search for the kernels of reality that get blown up into legends and myth. I wanted to expose how truth gets exaggerated and how we fool ourselves into believing in dreams. It’s ironic that the opposite happened. Knowing there is even a little truth to these stories gives people hope.”
“You sound as if you wish you were like them,” Theo said.
“Sometimes I wish I could be. It would be a relief to believe without so much questioning.”
As if he were suffering from the same illness, Theo said, “It sounds like a simpler way to go through life.”
Minerva was searching Jac’s face intently. Jac had been to enough therapists to recognize the peering gaze.
“What do you hope for?” Minerva asked.
“That I’ll find answers.” Jac felt sadness surge through her. She was suddenly homesick for her brother—the whimsical, creative mind that embraced the unknown without being wary of it. If she could just move a few steps in his direction, just open herself up a little to the infinite possibilities he talked about, maybe she’d be more fulfilled, less restless. Around him she could sometimes forget about all she doubted. Once, he’d almost made her believe she’d find her âme sœur, her soul mate, hadn’t he?
Except she knew there was no such thing. Or if she was being even more cynical, maybe there was such a thing, and she’d lost hers forever when she lost Griffin North.
Eva was talking to Minerva now. Jac picked up on the conversation in midsentence. “You know that’s what happened. Minerva, you know how obsessive our grandfather was about the library.” She was smoothing down the nap of the fabric on the chair. “It makes complete sense that he found the Hugo letter and it influenced him, doesn’t it? After all, our brother found the letter. Why couldn’t our grandfather have found it before him?” She stared down at the cushion and ran her hand across it again. “Then he would have known that name and suggested it to us, putting it in our head. It’s possible, don’t you see?”
Minerva gave a weary sigh. “Yes, it’s all possible.”
“He never should have involved us.” She looked at Jac. “We were just children.”
“Communicating with someone you believed was a spirit must have been frightening.” Jac was remembering her own childhood visions. “When we’re children the unknown takes on huge and terrifying proportions.”
Eva nodded vigorously.
“I wasn’t frightened,” Minerva said somewhat wistfully. “I was in awe.”
“You were frightened. You just don’t remember.”
Minerva stood and walked over to a section of bookcases on the wall opposite the fireplace. The lower third were fitted with drawers, not shelves. Minerva pulled one open and began to search through the contents. She withdrew several worn leather-bound journals. A box of what looked like stationery. Sticks of sealing wax. A handful of fountain pens. Several brass and silver seals. A few sheets of blotting paper. A crystal inkwell. A treasure trove of writing instruments from a bygone era.
Minerva was still extracting things from the drawer. A stack of envelopes tied with a burgundy ribbon. Bottles of ink.
“What are you doing?”
Eva asked. “Everything is carefully arranged.”
“Yes, and I’ll put it all back. I wish you would relax.”
“Yes, I’m sure you do.” Eva sighed. “But I won’t know where anything is if you don’t put it back exactly the way it was,” she continued.
“You haven’t needed anything in here for at least fifty or sixty years.”
“And how do you know that?”
Theo shot Jac an amused look. Living with his grandaunts, he must have heard hundreds of these conversations.
“There’s nothing to come of reading through those conversations now,” Eva said.
“That’s not what I’m getting,” Minerva said. She’d finished emptying out the drawer and now was lifting it out of the credenza.
“Then what are you doing?” Eva asked. “There’s nothing left in there.”
“But there is. Grandpapa showed me this hiding place. There’s a compartment here, under the drawer. I always thought you knew too. This is where he used to hide the board after Papa became so adamant about our not being included in the experiments anymore. Whenever our father came home from London,” Minerva said to Theo and Jac, “the board would go back in here for the duration and then come out again as soon as he left.”
Minerva pulled a long box out of the hiding space and carried it over to the sitting area.
Eva let out a small moan. As if the sight of it caused her pain. “It was there all this time?” Eva was agitated. Her voice was tight and stressed again. “Get rid of it, Minerva.”
Minerva looked at her older sister and frowned. “You are being ridiculous.”
“I want you to get rid of that thing.” Eva’s voice was raised. Her hands were clenched into fists.
Theo looked surprised, as if this level of bickering was not what he was used to.
“I honestly think that what you believe you remember about all this is an exaggerated childhood memory. Maybe if we look at it, the experience might be cathartic,” Minerva said.
“Cathartic? Why are you so hell-bent on revisiting this chapter of our lives? It’s a mistake. I’m warning you.”
Minerva unfolded the board. Fully opened it was about two feet long and eighteen inches wide. In the upper right-hand corner the word yes was printed in black ink. In the upper left was the word no. A semicircle of all the letters in the alphabet filled the center. Underneath that, along the bottom, were the numbers 0 to 9.