by Eric Griffin
With a mounting cry of fury, Eva snatched the censer that swung lazily above the central altar. Like a dark angel, she scooped up the fire of the altar and swung the censer three times in a wide arc. Loosing her grip, she hurled the blazing comet into the earth, into the very heart of the dark well. The waters roiled in answer with a cry as of many voices. The thunder danced above that cry and the earthquake rumbled beneath it.
Sturbridge could only look on in horror as her carefully-constructed grip on the mundane was shattered. In the turbulent light bubbling up from the well, she could already pick out the familiar features of the Stooped One taking form. The idol’s ebony body writhed in time to the music of the flames. Sturbridge saw that the sculpture was not formed of a single block of polished stone as she had first imagined, but was composed of dozens of lesser beings—their bodies twisted, frozen in time, preserved in attitudes of horror, defeat and despair. Their features were crude and animalistic. Their gaping wounds still oozed blood. The moans of their broken bodies, grinding one against the other, rattled the old bones scattered across the crypt floor.
Sturbridge shrank back from the hundred-handed one, trying to avoid the piercing single-eyed stare. She felt the icy weight of dread clutching at her. She tried to flee, but found that she was caught from behind. Clumsy bloated fingers knotted in the fabric of her robe. Her feet splashed and nearly slipped as she struggled free from the drowned one’s grip. The Well was disgorging its own.
“Say the words, Aisling.”
Sturbridge tried to turn toward the voice but found that the scene had again shifted. She was lost in a limestone landscape—a vast cavern carved out of the mountain’s heart by centuries of trickling water. The cave was a boneyard of scattered stalagmites and stalactites. It gaped like a raw mouthful of broken teeth.
The moaning was stronger here, echoed, redoubled. Sturbridge tried to shrink back from the clamor, to draw inward. The piercing wail ruptured her defenses. It broke in upon her sanctuary and dragged her back out.
She felt herself being drawn bodily toward the center of the cavern and the blasphemous sculpture that squatted there. Leopold’s sculpture, she realized with growing apprehension. His masterwork. His still life.
This is what Foley saw, she thought, just before he…
Her eyes could find no purchase upon the tangled remains of the massacred Gangrel. Her gaze traveled uncomprehendingly along the shifting line of twisted and broken bodies. Her mind could not seem to encompass it all. One victim flowed into the next, all distinctions blurring in that perfect marriage of the flesh. One in body. One in blood.
Sturbridge realized the sculpture was not so much a monument to the dead as an indictment of those, like herself, that still lingering here among the living.
“You can free them, Aisling.” The voice chorused from a dozen shrieking mouths, as if the entire statue was nothing more than some grisly pipe organ for Eva to play upon. “You can undo this atrocity. You can end their nightmare.”
“Stop it! Why are you doing this?”
“Think of the Children, Aisling.” Then the voice took on a more ominous tone. “Think of your own child. Think of Maeve.”
The scene shifted again, and she found herself teetering at the very brink of the dark well. She flailed and only narrowly caught herself on the slick stones. The waters that had already overflowed this bitter cup lapped over her feet, soaking the hem of her robes.
It was not Sturbridge’s cry toppling over the brink of the well and down into the darkness, but that of a child. A small, frightened child.
Sturbridge lurched toward the sound, knowing already it was too late. Years too late. She leaned far out over the gulf, clutching desperately at fistfuls of nothingness.
Her face pressed against the damp stones, her eyes screwed tightly shut. She could not bring herself to peer over the edge, to look upon the faces she knew would be awaiting her there. She sagged. Her voice was a broken whisper, lacking all certainty. “No. She is…they are gone, lost. Lost to us, long ago.”
“Call her, Aisling. She will come to you. She wants to come home. They have lost their way, that is all. But they want to come home. They are ready to come home now.
“Maeve?” Sturbridge mouthed the word, but all that escaped her lips was a broken animal sound.
“That’s right. Now louder, so that she will hear you. How can she follow your voice if she cannot hear you? How long has it been since you last saw her, Aisling? How long since that day when she was lost to you?”
“Night.” Sturbridge answered woodenly. She seemed lost in memory and unaware of her surroundings. “It was night. She lost her way, in the dark. I called to her. Told her to come back. Pleaded with her.”
“But she wouldn’t listen,” Eva supplied. “If only there were something. Something you could have said.”
“My beautiful child,” Sturbridge sunk to the ground and curled inward, elbows hugging knees. She ignored the rising waters. “My magical child. Too late. It was already too late. I tried to follow her.”
“Of course you did. You could not have known that she had gone. But there is still time. Call to her, Aisling. Call to her and she will come back to you.”
Sturbridge rocked slowly back and forth, moaning softly. Despite herself, her ears strained to pick out the sound of a distant voice, a lost cry, a familiar need. “Maeve.” It was more a sob than a call. “If I had known. If only I had known. No, she will not come back. Not now. She knows what I have done. What I have become.”
“But how could you have known?” Eva coaxed. “She will understand. She will come back to you. You are her mother. She loves you.”
“I never told her.” Sturbridge pushed herself uncertainly to her feet, struggling against the dead weight of her soaked robes. She turned toward Eva, words and water streaming from her. “But I thought it would be all right. I thought it would all turn out right. Just like in the Bible, with Abraham and Isaac. Abraham never told Isaac either, you know. Never sat the boy down and explained to him what had to be done. How can you explain something like that? That’s all I was reading those last nights. Must have read the story over a dozen times.”
“Then you knew she was going to die?”
“No,” Sturbridge’s voice was sharp, defensive. “I knew I was going to die. It is the price of being initiated into the secrets of this house. A distant echo of the sacrifice of our Founder and the Seven. It is our devil’s bargain, the contract signed in our own blood. To be transformed, to die, to rise again. But I never realized that when I died… I thought that she…” Sturbridge came up short, the words catching in her throat. Eva’s accusation had found its mark. The cruel point bit flesh, twisted, broke off in the wound.
I knew she was going to die.
Dark wings buffeted about Sturbridge’s face, the first familiar caress of Death, her longtime suitor. Wicked talons tore at her carefully constructed rationalizations. She tried to fend them off—the flurry of blows that neither cut nor bruised but rather seemed to smother. Her ears rang with the cry of carrion birds.
No! I did not kill her. I am no kinslayer. We do not eat our own young.
She must have spoken the words aloud. Eva moved towards her, making calming noises. “Quiet now. Easy. It’s all right. But there is only one way to know if she will understand, if she will forgive you. You must say the words. You must open the Well. You must call her back. You cannot possibly turn back now, knowing that she is this close. How will you live with yourself if you do not at least reach out to her, if you do not at least make the attempt?”
Sturbridge curled in upon herself, doubled over the raw wound piercing her side. Slow and low, like a broken rumbling from the deep places of the earth, the name tore free of her. “Maeve… My child. My beautiful little girl.”
Reluctantly, Sturbridge plunged down into that forbidden place at the very core of her being—the dark well in which she had so carefully drowned all those things she could never hope to face in her wa
king hours. Desperately she called out, floundering in the unfamiliar waters, casting about for some hint of the comforting image of her child’s face. The fickle and vindictive memory eluded her.
She has to be here. She cannot have escaped me. I have gone to such pains to keep her here, to keep her safe.
A face rose toward her, streaming up through the dark waters. A wave of relief and regret washed over Sturbridge as she picked out the first hint of the familiar—the wreath of billowing hair, dark as a battle raven. The gawky girlish form that hove into view a moment later was no blue and bloated corpse; it was vibrant and straight as a pin. The girl met Sturbridge’s imploring stare without flinching. Sturbridge could see that one of the girl’s eyes was milky white with the witchsight.
Sturbridge’s initial rush of elation died away. The girl’s features, they were not quite right. As she drew closer, the lines of the girl’s face resolved themselves into greater clarity. Sturbridge devoured those lines like a palmist, searching for meaning, understanding.
The tangle of lines drew suddenly into sharp focus. With a cry of denial, Sturbridge shrank back from both the realization and the figure before her—the image that was not her daughter’s—was never her daughter’s. But rather her own.
Angrily she kicked away from herself, twisting, calling Maeve’s name over and over again. Already she feared that it was too late. Decades of rationalization and self-deceit unraveled. Sturbridge found herself grasping desperately at the retreating end of her Ariadne’s thread.
Maeve is not here. Was never here.
She plunged deeper into the dark well of madness, seeking the comforting sands of oblivion in its depths. She had lost her child, her only daughter. And now even the memory was being taken from her. Lost. Gone. As if it had never been.
Sturbridge knelt at the very bottom of the well, frantically sifting through fistfuls of the sands of oblivion, seeking to unearth some shard of memory that had escaped the ravages of time. Some proof. Some vindication.
She tried to dredge up the day of Maeve’s birth—a day that had changed Sturbridge’s life irrevocably. The day that she had first awakened to her own magical nature. Nothing.
She tried to conjure up the images of those last tense hours before Maeve’s death, before she herself died and was reborn into the blasphemous society of the damned. Only more unraveling threads. Nothing Sturbridge could get a grip upon.
Already, some sense of the monstrous truth loomed over her, but she would not turn to face it. A birth that was no birth but her own. A death that was no death but her own. A child that was no true child, but the awakened flame of her own magical self, her alter ego, her avatar. That mystic part of herself that was so brutally snuffed out in her transformation. Ground out beneath the heel of the Stooped One, the Kinslayer.
Sturbridge felt the last shred of the pretense fall away. There was no point in resisting further. Her voice sounded small and lost amid the vastness of the tombs.
“Visita Interiora Terrae Rectificando Invenies Occultum Lapidem.”
Eva was only dimly aware of Sturbridge’s voice, hollowly reciting the words entrusted to her so long ago by the Light-Bringer—the Words of Fire and of Blood. She had already spun, quick and predatory, intent on catching the first hint of scrabbling bluish fingertips emerging from the rim of the Well.
The waters roiled and sloshed violently over the brink. There was a sudden rush of air and a radiant figure, bright and pale as moonlight, erupted from surface of the brooding waters. Eva staggered back. With a piercing cry, the gleaming figure broke free and rose triumphantly above the well, unfurling wings of purest flame.
For a moment, Eva had the distinct and unsettling perception that the figure above her was rendered entirely in the negative. It did not seem to protrude into space in the same way that a normal person or object would. It had no depth to it, no thickness. Rather, it seemed to be a human-shaped rent in the background of the room. An aperture through which a piercing light shone.
Eva felt the searing heat of that light fall upon her, felt the scrutiny of that all-consuming eye. She screamed and clawed at her face.
In those final moments, staring directly into the deepest recesses of that shining well, that brilliant hole between the worlds, Eva had the most peculiar impression. She thought, if only for an instant, that the entire world she knew—a world unambiguously bounded by somber crypts and chantry walls, by pyramids and hierarchies, by ritual formulae and an unbroken line of victims (their watery eyes bright and round as saucers)—that her carefully ordered world was only a sad, tattered sort of pasteboard backdrop. That only the thinnest and most hastily constructed veneer protected the inhabitants of this world from the ravenous scrutiny of the divine.
The last thing she heard before the light consumed her utterly was Sturbridge purring quietly, monstrously to herself, “My child. My beautiful little girl.”
About the Author
Eric Griffin was ushered into the bardic mysteries at their very source, Cork, Ireland. He is currently engaged in that most ancient of Irish literary traditions—that of the writer in exile. He resides in Atlanta, Georgia, with his lovely wife Victoria and his three sons, heroes-in-training all.
His other works include Clan Novel: Tzimisce, Three Pillars and Castles and Covenants.