The Cornerstone

by Anne C. Petty

Addie took another quick look at the beverages menu. “Samuel Adams.”

  “Got it. Claire?” Tom shoved his chair back and stood.

  She looked up and caught something in his gray eyes that telegraphed...what? He’d never paid her the slightest bit of attention before. She blinked and looked again, but the moment was gone. “I don’t care, anything light.” She watched him thread his way through the tightly packed tables and throng near the bar. He was actually attractive, in a rough sort of way. Some girl ought to snatch him up.

  She turned back to find Addie giving her a knowing look. “Nice butt, yeah?”

  “Butts all look alike.”

  Addie crossed her arms over her chest. “No, Claire, they do not. You definitely need a drink, or three.”

  Morris was smiling his usual snarky smile and giving Tom a guarded look. Claire slumped in her chair—they could think what they wanted. He wasn't her type, if indeed anyone was.

  Tom returned with a mug of his favorite stout in hand and resumed his seat at the table. "Order's in, but it may take a few minutes. Apologies for getting a head start." He took a long swallow from the mug.

  “Why’s it so crowded, I wonder?” Addie craned her neck to look down the room.

  “Doyle says it's a wake, or the remnants of it. Those who’d had enough of the party came here.”

  Morris laughed. “A good Irish pub, indeed.”

  “Tom's got an Irish tattoo, don't you?” Addie touched his arm.

  Morris leaned his elbows on the table. “Yeah, what is that design? Ruben seemed impressed.”

  Tom sighed and leaned back in his chair. “I got it years ago, traveling.”

  Claire's interest was piqued. “Can I see?”

  Tom gave her what she now thought of as his patented “why not” look, and pushed up the sleeve of his sweatshirt. “It’s a four-cornered knot,” he said, index finger tracing the point where the thorned vines converged.

  “Hey, I know what that is…that’s a shield knot. Very important in Celtic folklore and sidhe magick,” Addie said. “The shield knot is protection against evil forces. The practitioner uses it to call on the gods from the four corners of the world, or the elements like earth, wind, water, and fire.” Addie looked at Tom. “It’s a pagan protection charm.”

  “I thought he was a Buddhist,” said Morris.

  Tom pulled his sleeve down. “Buddhism’s an attitude, not a religion. And the shield knot design was suggested to me by someone I had no choice but to trust.”

  Morris’s lips pouted and then smirked. “Did it work—have you been protected from evil spirits?”

  Tom’s eyes narrowed. “Who’s to say?”

  Claire listened without joining in. She normally had no deep opinion on things religious and/or supernatural, but this revelation of Tom’s was skewing all to hell her notion of who she’d thought he was. What did he think he needed a protection charm for, and more to the point, why would he put faith in such a thing to begin with? Of the four of them, Addie was the only one likely to believe in such stuff. Claire cut her eyes toward Tom again. Surely he was putting them on, although she wouldn’t mind having a protection charm herself right now if it would banish her nightmares. She pushed those thoughts away as a waiter arrived with their ales and stouts. Tom had ordered her something in an amber-colored bottle with the name Finnegan’s on the label.

  “I don’t want us to lose touch with each other after the play’s done,” Addie was saying. “I think we’ve created something really great together, and…I just want to stay in touch.”

  “Adelaide has a point,” Morris said. “I will admit I went into this play with some reservations, but once you joined the cast,” he said, nodding toward Tom, “that sort of upped the ante. I do like a challenge.”

  “I’d like us all to stay friends, too.” Claire hoped she didn’t sound too needy.

  Tom sat with his hands clasped in front of him on the table. “A toast, then.”

  “Great idea!” Addie was all smiles.

  Tom rose and spoke in an Irish accent so spot on he could have passed for a native. The pub fell silent as the dozen or so lads from the wake stopped to listen.

  “Of all the money e’er I had,

  I spent it in good company.

  And all the harm I e’er have done,

  Alas! ‘Twas all to none but me.

  And all I’ve done for want of wit

  To mem’ry now I can’t recall.

  So fill to me the partin’ glass,

  Good night and joy be with you all.”

  He put the half-consumed mug of stout to his mouth and drained it dry.

  “Here, here,” said Morris and took a long pull from his bottle.

  “Cheers!” Addie did likewise. The members of the wake hoisted their mugs and drank.

  Claire felt numb. There was no joy in Tom’s expression. Unless she was grossly mistaken, his toast had sounded like he was telling them all goodbye, not simply good night. Reluctantly, she tasted the ale Tom had selected for her. It was lightly sweet with a butterscotch undertaste. “Salute.”

  Tom sat down and the chatter of voices rose again, but Claire recognized the old familiar shroud of despair wrapping itself around her shoulders, settling in, shutting everything down. The others laughed and talked, but their voices slipped through her consciousness with no meaning attached. She hoped she could get home without driving into the headlights of a semi.

  It was past midnight when Claire finally pulled into the bungalow’s driveway. She’d driven home slowly, paying excruciating attention to the yellow lines on the six-lane parkway as if she were landing a 747 at Hartsfield. Once inside, she checked on her mother and found her asleep in bed. The idea of making some tea, something soothing like chamomile, was appealing, but instead she buttoned up her coat and went back outside. The night was clear and cold, the stars all pinpricks of ice. Unable to face the idea of getting in bed and trying to fall asleep, she started walking.

  She automatically headed northeast, toward the houses a block over. As a kid, she would have gone out her back gate, run down a narrow dirt alley, cut through a neighbor’s yard, and been at Jackie’s house in under five minutes, but this time she took the long way around, coming to the end of her own block and following the sidewalk over to the next row of small, cozy houses drowsing under ponderous oaks older than the city itself.

  She didn’t expect anyone to be awake at Jackie’s house this late, and had no intention of stopping there if the lights happened to be on. It was just the comfort of seeing the house, feeling its proximity ripe with memory that she craved. That helpless sense of time fast-forwarding, slipping away even as you tried to nail it down, was a visceral ache in her gut. People at school and then at work always said things like, “You’re still young” or “You have your whole life ahead of you,” which made her want to vomit. Physically. It wasn’t so much the idea of the years stretching out in front of her with no end in sight that did it to her…it was the sense that it meant nothing. A speck on the eyelash of the deity, which she didn’t believe in anyway. In the long run, what was the point of everything you went through? She couldn’t see it.

  She wandered down the block, feeling the cold air on her face. The Suttons’ house was up ahead. She hardly saw Jackie anymore, but still the knowledge that within another week or so she would be gone for good was an emptiness Claire didn’t know how she was going to face. She knew she had an oversized problem dealing with change, but change involving this kind of loss was like a pit opening up in front of her. A shrink would have a field day with her, she was sure, which was probably why she’d resisted getting that kind of so-called “help” for so long. Paul seemed to have benefitted from it, but she simply could not see herself in the psych’s office, stretched out on a couch, stripping away all her defenses and blathering about her innermost terrors to a stranger. Not happening. She’d rather step in front of a truck.

  The Suttons’ house was dark when she reached it, everyone
tucked in their beds like they were supposed to be. She stood in front of it, thinking of Jackie and all the time they’d spent growing up together. Time to move on. She allowed the misery of the situation to fully sink in, and then headed home.

  Reaching her own yard by the alley, Claire came in at the back gate. She found the tire swing in the yard and settled herself into it. She was tired to the bone. Somehow she’d managed to pull her shit together at work on the surface, so there were no more mistakes for Paul to bitch about. But she was barely hanging on. It would be fairly easy to self-medicate, since Paul did the driving while she rode in the back with whoever they’d picked up. Also too easy to get caught, and she knew it would happen eventually. The drugs were available and tempting, but she wasn’t that far gone.

  Her thoughts wandered as she pushed off the ground and held onto the tire. How many times had she sat in this swing as a kid, wondering where it would all end. Even then, as a first-grader, she’d had those feelings of helplessness in the face of a future she couldn’t see. Even that young, she’d done a lot of what she did now—attempting to ease her fear that she was going insane by doing things that carried surface meaning, things that promised fleeting, manufactured moments of what those around her considered fun or important or exciting.

  She remembered a selfish outburst as an adolescent when she’d clung to the swing screaming and wailing with tears because her parents wouldn't take her to the beach on a sunny Sunday afternoon. She now understood that tantrum better. What it had really been about was a crushing sense of emptiness, of lost opportunity that had consumed her when the afternoon could not be spent in a fun physical activity that kept the scary thoughts of losing her grip at bay. Life had seemed irreparably damaged on that long-ago afternoon, when the possibility of something potentially meaningful had failed to materialize. Like so much that came after.

  Claire closed her eyes and savored the cold as it brushed over her face while the swing slowed its pendulum rush, back and forth, slower and slower…and suddenly the air was so frigid it took her breath away. Her eyes flew open just in time to realize the specter from her nightmares was right in front of her. The thing was transparent, so that she could see the outline of the house and back patio through it, yet defined enough to have shape and movement. She fell out of the swing and cowered like a trapped rabbit on the damp ground. This was it—she’d finally snapped. Claire curled into a tight ball, her head tucked down, as if that could possibly protect her from the terrifying shroud-draped creature that hovered above her.

  Images began to take shape in her mind, eyelid movies impossible to interpret. She saw a rocky hillside, wind-scraped and pummeled with rain. A corpse lay at the entrance to a tomb, a bloody rock nearby. She saw herself coming out of the storm. She stooped to pick up the stone, stepped over the bodies (now there seemed to be several), and staggered down the slope with the heavy treasure in her arms. The scene abruptly shifted to the basement of the Janus Theatre, where she sat in the center of the floor, cradling the blood-soaked stone in her lap while flames ate the shadows and cobwebs but left her untouched. Claire whimpered in terror, knowing that her rational mind was truly past repair and all that was left was to be locked up in a straight jacket somewhere, medicated for the rest of her life in a fog of paranoia.

  Gradually the freezing sensation abated, and she dared to open her eyes. No apparition. She lifted her head, and then sat up. She was shaking, her teeth clattering loud enough to be alarming. She was alone, but utterly unhinged. How long she sat in the dew-covered grass beside the tire swing was anyone’s guess, but when she finally got to her feet, the sky was more gray than black. She stumbled into the house and fell onto her bed in her coat and shoes and knew nothing until the sun was well risen.

  * * * *

  Red, and frozen black. These were the colors the witch tasted most. Sometimes she smelled white, but the sensation was fleeting. Colors and senses as she once remembered them were a continuous gestalt of consciousness, formless yet discrete. Sometimes she even remembered her name. She should be dead, but wasn’t. And there was another here with her, also trapped, a thing that had never been human, unlike herself.

  On occasion, the elemental was a frenzied, raging beast lashing out, inchoate, in all directions, mindlessly clawing to get out. When that happened, it shredded her etheric body without mercy, or possibly even without cognizance, so that each time her soul, or what was left of it, felt more dispersed, less viable than before.

  At other times, the banshee folded itself into a frigid black space of coiled baleful cunning, scheming the way a trapped animal would, trying to find an opening in the walls of its prison. When it wanted to communicate with its human captor, it slid into her mind and used her voice. This was nothing she could control—it was beyond her powers to keep it out, not that she particularly wanted to. It provided her some entertainment to torment Master Marlowe when the opportunity presented itself. The crushing of his bones had been particularly tasty.

  Lately she’d noticed the banshee probing the mind of a female presence that it sensed was vulnerable, ever since the woman had touched the stone while it was wet. An accident, she assumed, because who would willingly open themselves up to a brush with the essence of a bain-sídhe? She’d felt the young woman’s spirit—frustrated, easily dispirited, yet oddly strong in some ways having to do with the care of other humans—as it fled past her, sucked into the vortex where the stone had first been transferred to Master Marlowe’s keeping. He’d somehow managed to pull her out again, although her tenuous connection to the elemental remained like a scent that couldn’t be scrubbed off. But whatever the creature hoped to gain from this effort seemed futile, a plan hatched in mindless desperation. The witch had other options.

  The elemental enjoyed no conception of time—it simply was—but the witch remained aware of the passage of years from the taste and impressions of the blood of the victims with which the stone was bathed. She could also feel the march of time and the shift of centuries through her connection to the stone’s masters, first the hated sorcerer John Dee and after him the rash and sometimes foolish playwright Christopher Marlowe, and through them occasionally others within their sphere of influence. And exactly twenty-one days ago, she’d been shocked to her core by a brief spike of energy, a long-forgotten essence, a soul lost and recovered and lost again. She’d quested out for it immediately after that first blinding flash, and tasted it in the auric field surrounding her so-called master. And little by little, against all odds, she’d begun to hope.

  Chapter 18

  Friday – Opening Night

  “Where’s the patron seating?” A white-haired, overdressed woman leaving a heavy floral perfume trail took one of the elaborately designed programs Claire held in a box.

  “First four rows.” Claire tried not to breathe too deeply. “They’re marked off, just sit past the red ribbons.”

  The theater was filling up. Claire counted the rows that still had empty seats and there weren’t many. Standing at the back where the double doors were propped open, she and a couple of volunteers were handing out programs. Bayard had ordered 550 printed, which was fifty more than the exact number of seats, but it seemed to her they should have done more. If they ended up with a full house, there wouldn’t be many left as souvenirs of the show, considering some people had asked for two. The price break wasn’t significant unless you ordered at least a thousand, and the promotions budget hadn’t allowed the company to spend that much money unless they were willing to scrimp somewhere else. That’s what Morris had told her, knowing as he did all about the cost of getting things printed. She’d already stashed away a copy for her mother, who’d asked for one because Claire’s name was listed among the crew.

  She’d dressed in her one good outfit, a gray velveteen pantsuit that had already earned her a number of compliments. With her hair pulled up and a piece of her mother’s jewelry, an 18k gold brooch of a butterfly, on her lapel, she felt as much in costume as anyone in
the cast.

  She doled the programs out without paying much attention to the stream of people filling the auditorium until a young man stopped in front of her and opened his palm for a program. He was tall and so incredibly good looking she thought he must be a model or an actor. Golden blonde curls framed his chiseled cheekbones and caressed the collar of his perfectly fitted tux. She caught her breath at his incredibly blue eyes as he whispered “thank you” in a voice that in any other circumstance would have sounded overwhelmingly seductive. His fingers lightly brushed hers as she gave him the program. So cold. He should have worn gloves to the play. She watched him maneuver with feline-hipped grace around the people still lingering in the aisle chatting. Beautiful men had never given her much heart flutter, but she would’ve made an exception for that one. Was he a celebrity? She’d have to ask Addie after the show if they had any famous guests on the patron’s list.

  Claire felt butterflies in her stomach, in a good way. The whole air of opening night was tense with anticipation, something she’d never experienced. Sure, she’d been to a couple of plays and live concerts, but never from the other side of the aisle, as a member of the group putting on the show. The audience buzz was lively, especially because of the way Bayard had directed the stage setup. The curtains were wide open with Faustus’ study fully revealed under a single spotlight while the rest of the stage was in shadow. Dressing the set was being done in front of the audience, as if they were watching through a window into the room. Two stagehands dressed as pages ambled across the stage, carrying Faustus’ ornate chair and placing it just so in front of the desk. Then another in a scholar’s robe came out of the wings with the tall desk candle and placed it carefully beside the books and papers. Although she’d seen this bit practiced any number of times, Claire watched all the stage business from the audience’s perspective now, feeling excitement build as the set came together.