by Eric Griffin
Jacqueline did not recall, however, ever experiencing this disorientation, dizziness, nausea. She tried to ignore the unexpected side effects and push herself to her feet. A bad idea. She found herself unceremoniously returned to the floor.
She forced her eyes to focus on the small square of floorboard directly in front of her. The dizziness receded a pace. From this proximity, she could pick out even the grain of the wood through the faint smear of chalk and dust, scuffed by the passing of feet.
Foley would not have tolerated it, of course—were he still around to object. To leave the residual traces of ritual wardings, even until the next morning, would have ensured a harsh reprimand from the secundus.
Jacqueline was particularly interested in the wardings, after the rumors she had heard whispered in the novice hall. Experimentally, she lifted her head to follow the line of the hermetic diagramma. Seeing that the vertigo did not lash out at her for this presumption, she made so bold as to creep forward along the line on all fours. Yes, it was as she thought. The diagramma had been purposefully obscured, erased. But why?
The junior novices were full of tales of unwarded summonings and dark rites and devils. Jacqueline blamed that fool storyteller Talbott for fanning their wild speculations. The first thing to do to forestall further talk of the dark arts—a discussion that might lead to a closer examination of the ceremonial tools employed in the ritual and certain suspicious ingredients used in their creation—would be to let it become known that the proper wardings had been in place. That the ritual was perfectly normal and perhaps even mundane. But—that the wardings had been purposefully obscured by Foley’s murderer.
It would not be prudent for Jacqueline to point this fact out herself, but there were ways in any tight community to ensure that certain things were spoken of.
Jacqueline raised herself to one knee, leaning heavily upon the nearest file cabinet. Better. Another long pause, and she felt confident enough to regain her feet. She had some things to gather and, even with the thought of another wrenching translocation before her, the less time she had to spend here, the better.
Looking around the room, Jacqueline discovered that there was, as she had suspected, at least one other warding in the room. This later addition was quite obviously installed after the discovery of the murder. It adorned the near side of the room’s only door—the one leading to the adjoining office. It was not difficult to extrapolate the existence of a similar warding upon the outer door of Foley’s apartments.
It was her anticipation of these wardings that had led Jacqueline to the avoid the standard means of ingress altogether. Her ritual had cost her two weeks’ time—a small price to pay under normal circumstances, but time was dear because there was much more at stake here. Jacqueline lived those weeks in constant dread of a summons to appear before the regent for judgment.
But that summons had never come. Jacqueline had weathered the initial interview by adopting the time-honored persona of the terrified novice. She had blathered, she had fumbled, she had begged forgiveness for each time she had thought ill of the secundus. She had steadfastly maintained the ludicrous assertion that she was personally responsible for Foley’s demise because deep down she had wished him dead.
It was entirely possible, of course, that her efforts had not been convincing, that she had not escaped judgment at all, that her sentence of Final Death was only a bit delayed in arriving. If Jacqueline could remain patient through those agonizing weeks, certainly Sturbridge could as well.
Now, even with the regent away in Baltimore, Jacqueline knew her very presence in Foley’s rooms put her at grave risk. The warding on the door would certainly bring a full security team down on her, should she inadvertently trigger it. And this was assuming, of course, that it was not efficiently designed to neutralize any intruders by itself.
With agonizing care, Jacqueline crossed the room to the worktable. She stooped and studied something lying neglected on the floor. A red candle. Satisfied, she nodded. From the voluminous folds of her robes, she extracted a bundle and unrolled it flat upon the table. It contained precisely seven red candles and seven wooden sticks. She removed one glove and, lifting the first pristine candle, traced a line down its edge with her fingernail. Where she touched it, the wax melted and ran. She judged the length of the candle and then of the wick, pinching it off neatly and noting the clean, black, seared edge. She cracked the candle at precisely the same point where the other had been broken in its fall, and then examined her efforts with a critical eye. That would do.
She swapped her less-incriminating replica with its twin on the floor, taking a moment to get the positioning just right before beginning her hunt for the next of the scattered candles.
In the end, she only recovered five candles and six pine sticks. She would have to hope that the rest had been consumed in the fire. She did not care to dwell on the alternative—that they had been removed from the scene.
She carefully repacked her bundle, pulled on her glove and turned back toward the low cupboard. There was a reassuring faint crackle of energy from the arcane membrane that remained stretched taut across the opening.
Jacqueline froze. The sound had nearly, but not entirely, masked a faint noise from the outer room. The unmistakable sound of a doorknob turning.
Saturday, 28 August 1999, 3:00 AM
Lord Baltimore Inn
Baltimore, Maryland
“Ready to go already, Professor?” Francesca Lyon hovered in the doorway as if unwilling to intrude.
“Very nearly, Miss Lyon. Please come in. It was kind of you to come on such short notice.” She gestured toward the seating arrangement near the fireplace and returned to her packing.
“Thanks. Can’t I give you a hand?”
“No, just finishing up now. Please, sit down. Make yourself comfortable.”
Sturbridge crossed to an intricately carved oak cabinet along one wall. The twin doors were decorated with a knotted design resembling a wreath woven of dried twigs. Her audience had the distinct impression that the cabinet door swung open a fraction of a second before Sturbridge’s hand found the latch. She withdrew a decanter and two crystal goblets from the shadowed recess.
It was not until that moment that Sturbridge committed herself to this course of action. Perhaps it was her unsettling experience earlier with drawing life from the ancient wood that had put her in mind of it. Perhaps it was the all-too-fresh memories of her own daughter. Perhaps it was only the frustration of the prospect of having this entire trip to Baltimore prove to be a waste.
As she recrossed the room, she studied her guest’s features for any sign of recognition, of apprehension. In this she was disappointed. Chessie’s demeanor remained friendly, personal, at ease.
Sturbridge began to fill both goblets.
Chessie raised a hand in polite refusal. “No, not for me. I’m driving. But thank you.”
“But I insist. We will toast Dean Dorfman, so you can put it down to official university business.”
“Dean Dorfman warned me about drinking with any of his colleagues,” she said with subdued conviction.
“This is a particular vintage that I keep on hand for just such occasions. It has weathered the scrutiny of the most exacting of palates. I think you will enjoy it.”
Slowly, some idea of what she was being offered seemed to dawn upon Chessie. She regarded the proffered glass as she might a cup of hemlock.
“It is an old family recipe, handed down to me by my sire, and by his sire before him. There are many generations to its noble lineage.” Sturbridge swirled her chalice reverently, inhaling the heady aroma.
“It sounds delightful. But I can’t ask you to share such a family treasure with me. Dean Dorfman…”
“I will be frank, Miss Lyon. I am concerned for Dean Dorfman’s safety. He has been gone overlong in a time when he can scarcely afford to be absent at all. If he does not return quickly, you will find yourself in need of a new advisor. I would like to help you. D
o not be nervous. This is how we sit down to discuss business in my house. Do you understand? First, there is blood between us. Then there is business.”
“I did not know that you trafficked in trust, Professor.”
“I don’t. I trade in blood, Miss Lyon. Only in blood. Everything else is fleeting, treacherous, and, in the end, inconsequential.”
“To blood.” Chessie raised the glass to her lips, closed her eyes and drank. Immediately, she slipped sideways into the whisperings.
“To business,” Sturbridge countered, savoring the heady vintage.
Chessie was surrounded by hushed voices. A landscape composed solely of wisps of night and hushed voices. The whispers were pitched low, just beyond the range of her understanding. The words seemed to lose their way in the darkness; she could pick out only the symphony of tones. They tugged at her, poked and prodded. The voices seemed to be alternately urging her to action, consoling her, passing judgment, haggling, hinting at the forbidden, barking commands, reciting elegies, giving patient instruction—but all of them were quite clear on this one point. They all wanted something from her. Expected something. Something she could not quite make out from the incessant and hopelessly intermingled mutterings.
She was buffeted by the maelstrom of their expectation, drawn in, borne down. Her consciousness flickered dangerously on the edge of being extinguished. Each new gust threatened to snuff out the delicate flame utterly. She clung to life, to its broken fragments, like a person floundering amidst the wreckage of a sinking ship.
Chessie broke the surface, gasping, not for air, but for awareness. Her grasp found and latched on to some jettisoned piece of flotsam. It writhed in her grasp, but she held firm. Clawing the hair from her eyes with her free hand, she saw that which she clung to, and her hope failed her. A great eel, its lustrous skin gleaming redly, wound its way free of the wreckage and out into the open sea. Chessie watched in horror as her lifeline twisted, arced, and then plunged into the deep. She clawed at the slippery flank with both hands as it bore her under for the final time.
The eel was a streak of red cutting through the deep. As awareness faded to a dim glimmer of light far above her, Chessie found herself musing that the back of the great red eel resembled nothing more than a stringy tendril of blood suspended in the murky water.
Awareness flickered one last time and was gone. Blotted out by the weight of dark water above it.
Then there was only the blood.
The blood bore the broken shell down, down deep to the very heart of the sea. It buried it there in the powdery and ever-shifting sand.
Miserere nobis.
Miserere nobis.
Dona nobis pacem.
The ocean floor was a vast hourglass. Years passed; their number measured out in the shifting of a given number of grains of sand.
Years later.
The bottom of the ocean.
The scratching of the grains of sand. Sliding slowly. Slowly sliding.
The sound intruded upon the welcome oblivion. Like a soft scratching at the coffin lid. The sound of years passing.
Scrape. Scrape. Scrape.
A drifting of three years.
Scrape. Scrape. Scrape.
The sound rose in pitch and immediacy. It fell with the regularity of a spade.
Strike, scrape, slough.
A shovelful of years.
Strike, scrape, slough.
There was an urgency in the song of the spade. A compulsion. And a note of something familiar.
Fran. Ces. Ca.
Fran. Ces. Ca.
The alien syllables meant nothing to the dead and broken shell buried at the ocean’s heart. But the sounds echoed and rebounded within the hollow of that shell—redoubling in meaning and intensity—until something deep within stirred at the sound of that summons.
Francesca.
Awareness came flooding back in an excruciating rush. She curled in upon herself, tumbling, kicking. She tried to burrow deeper into the sands, into the warm oblivion.
Still the voice would not let her rest.
Francesca.
She knew that voice. Sturbridge. Professor Sturbridge.
Francesca oriented herself by that voice and kicked out desperately for the surface.
The first thing to return to her was light. Slowly it resolved itself into distinct shapes, patterns, vision. Soon she could not shut out the swarm of wriggling shadows that surrounded her.
The sea was filled with hundreds of drowning bodies, all fighting for the surface. The blue and bloated limbs of those who had already succumbed to the struggle snatched at her, clung to her, bore her down. Back down toward the ocean floor and the waiting arms of oblivion.
“Aisling!”
A swollen face pressed close to her own. It bobbed gently, aimlessly, from side to side, its hair fanning out in the current. It regarded her with a clinical, almost serene detachment. Thick, sausage-like fingers experimentally probed and prodded her. Chessie batted at the corpse, trying to dislodge it.
“Fear not. I am here.” The voice was small and distant.
The drowned body was much more immediate. Draped languidly in fetters of clinging seaweed, it embraced Chessie, entangling her flailing limbs as the pair tumbled over and over. From somewhere amidst the tangle, a glint of metal, the kiss of scalpel-sharp blade, and a viscous trail of blood extending out like a lifeline from an incision in Chessie’s chest. Lost beneath her own howl, Chessie thought she could pick out Sturbridge’s calm voice, plodding on with patience and reverence as if reciting some ancient tale or scripture.
“He was the serpent in the Garden of Hermes. Our beloved oracular serpent. The end product of hundreds of years of devotion to the Great Work.”
The apparition clutched its prize tightly within one oversized fist. With a deft motion, he snared the end of the trailing strand of blood, still uncoiling from the gaping wound in Chessie’s chest, and looped it three times about its fist.
He tested its pull. She bent like a bow.
“He was the object of our devotion, the meaning behind the sacrifice of uncounted lives—Pythagoreans, Catharists, Masons, alchemists—all struggling in darkness so that one day, generations hence, one man could hold in his hand the forbidden fruit, the Philosopher’s Stone, the elixir of life everlasting. His name was called Goratrix, our light-bearer, our Prometheus, our Lucifer.”
The bloated face leered over her in a mocking half-bow. It reeled Chessie in slowly, pressing uncomfortably close, a lover bent on confiding a dark secret. Its chill lips brushed her ear.
Helpless in that grasp, Chessie felt more than heard the words:
Visita lnteriora Terrae, Rectificando lnvenies Occultum Lapidem.
“Visit the center of the Earth,” she haltingly translated. “And by…purifying?…you will find the secret stone.”
A grotesquely swollen blue hand slapped her heartily on the back. The corpse’s head rolled back slowly in a laugh that Chessie thought might dislodge head from body altogether. In this, she was disappointed.
Shouldering Chessie’s lifeline, the drowned man turned and plodded off downwards toward the ocean’s floor. His captive had little choice save to flounder along in his wake.
Chessie felt the darkness closing in once again. Consciousness slipping from her. Seeping away through the hole in her chest.
Sturbridge’s voice was the sussurant lull of the ocean currents.
“It was in the blood, of course. The power was in the blood. But Goratrix did not partake of the dark gift. Not right away. Instead he returned to his House and sought out his master, laying before him the forbidden fruit.”
Chessie could not focus upon the words. She could no longer discern where she ended, and the expanse of dark waters began. She drifted unhurriedly toward a murky hole in the ocean’s floor, following a distant bobbing light. The elusive light seemed to sneak past the tin shutter of an upraised lantern. The lamp was held aloft by a solitary laborer making his way home after dark
, and struggling under a heavy burden.
As the laborer shifted the load to his other shoulder, Chessie perceived that the light was not separate from the lantern but attached, intrinsic to it. The light streamed out behind it—red, coiling, restless.
It is in the blood, of course, Chessie thought, a dark almost hysterical laugh welling up inside her. The light is in the blood.
My blood.
She was very close now. Close to the reckless abandon of hysteria. Close to the point of surrender, of returning to oblivion. Close to the dark hole at the center of the ocean’s floor.
Visita interiora terrae.
The center of the earth. The forbidden place. The dark region at the very center of herself that she dared not go (could not go). The place where she kept, carefully guarded, her secrets from herself.
It was a place denied her. Beyond the comforting walls of self-deceit, of self-delusion. She knew there was a still point, a place of searing clarity where all the justifications, all the rationalization, of a lifetime of inhuman hungers burned away. Leaving her alone with her sins, her shortcomings, her selfishness—her self.
It was a dwelling place of truths so dark they had to be forced down, chained to the bedrock, lest they rise up to assail her in the dark hours.
Visita interiora mea.
There was a movement in the deepest recesses of the dark hole at the ocean’s heart. A stirring.
Chessie twisted, thrashed against her tether. Trying in vain to avert her gaze from the presence rising up from the depths.
There was a swirling of sand, resolving itself slowly into a twisting funnel. A looming mass taking form, becoming.
The rising maelstrom howled with the grinding of sand and water. Chessie shielded her eyes. She could distinctly feel the impact of each grain of sand slicing into her exposed lifeline. The shadowy form that dragged her onward was already lost amidst the turbulent waters.
The only evidence that her predecessor had not already been utterly destroyed was the continued pull upon her yoke. Drawing her directly into the heart of the maelstrom. A great rushing of sand and water buffeted her, blinded her, snatched her up. She spun wildly, spinning end over end, dragging against her anchor line.