The Cornerstone

by Anne C. Petty

  He turned his gaze to Claire, frozen in mid-scream. “Lady Claire, the ultimate bystander. As much as I’d like to include you in our little charade, you sadly have no part in this morality play. You’ve lived your life in a safe little shell where nothing outré ever happens and there’s no compelling reason to believe in things you can’t explain. Stand out of the way, where you belong, and observe.” Claire staggered backward as if pushed and fell against the basement wall like a pile of sticks.

  The prince of devils then turned his attention to Orin. “You, however, are a different case. Unlike poor Claire, who cannot get invited to the party, you have crashed its merriment in your own unique way.” He stepped closer, so that Bayard could not mistake the baleful gleam in his eyes. As he stretched out his graceful hand, all the hairs on Bayard’s body stood alive with the energy crackling off the demon’s alabaster skin. If there were such a thing as a force field, he was feeling it now.

  The demon reached around Bayard to Orin and laughed softly. “Oh, I would so love to present this one to my Master. I would, indeed. But that unpleasant image inked on your skin and infused with spellcraft from my old partner in crime prevents me from taking you.” Bayard felt Orin’s defiance flowing through them even though his lips were frozen shut.

  Mephistopheles stepped behind Bayard, and although he could not see him grasp the Irish witch, he felt her venom as her limbs remained speared through his own body.

  "We come now to Radha Ó Braonáin, a wicked witch if ever there was one." Mephistopheles chuckled. “I can hardly absolve you of your many sins, even if I wanted to. And I don’t, of course. I claimed you as mine long before you raised the spell that called the bain-sídhe. Shall I be merciful and give you the death you crave, alongside your dutiful son? Alas, I am afraid that was not in the mission statement I received from the One I serve. So sorry, but you’ll be coming along with me and Master Marlowe.”

  Bayard trembled at the sound of his name in the beautiful man’s mouth. The sensations that played along his paralyzed nerves were an unfathomable combination of ecstasy and pure horror. So, it was as he’d feared…he would not be spared.

  Mephistopheles turned to Claire again. “Don't look so terrified. You won’t die. Not here, anyway. That little gold pin from your sainted mother is quite distasteful to my driver and I’m afraid he won’t let you in the carriage. Don’t understand? Google it.” His grin was so bright Bayard had to shut his eyes—it was like looking into the fiery heart of a star going nova.

  Mephistopheles damped down his powers to a tolerable level and addressed Orin. “You should be happy. You accomplished part of your mission. Your mother will be set free...she just won't be allowed to accompany you into the afterlife. Sure you won’t come along with us? My Master would accept you in a heartbeat, if you had one.” Bayard felt waves of silent fury beating against his back.

  The demon from Hades laughed softly. “No? Well, my loss, I suppose. I hadn’t factored you into the bargain from the start. But it all works out in the end, eh?” He stepped up to the coach and snapped his fingers. Instantly, all bonds of silence and movement were loosed.

  With hands still affixed to the cornerstone, Bayard looked up and saw the banshee hovering above him in her fully humanized form. He saw her first as a beautiful Irish maid with glossy black hair and a rosy flush over her cheeks, but instead of the emerald eyes one would expect to find on a fair colleen, hers were red—pupil, iris, the entire eyeball. Her fair features then slid into the decaying flesh of a rotting corpse. She leaned her head back and shrieked twice more. Three deaths in all.

  From the dullahan’s head came a chilling voice with a thick Irish brogue, like the sound of screeing wind over the moors: “Orrrin Ó Brrraonáin.”

  Bayard felt, but could not see, the flesh suit worn by the witch’s son quiver and fade until its presence was gone. Craning his neck with great effort, he saw the source of the summoning voice. The dullahan cracked its bone whip with a dry, clacking snap and again held up its glowing head. It called out the witch’s name, r’s tumbling out like rocks in a landslide. “Rrrradha Ó Brrraonáin.” The door of the coach flew open and her essence was sucked into its black maw, leaving a raw wound gaping in Bayard’s midsection as she passed through. He stared down at the hole where his heart should have been. It did not bleed.

  Once more, the dullahan lifted its head. The brazen voice called out a third name. "Chrrristopher Marrrlowe." In the space of a thought, he found himself inside the coach, seated beside the Shining One. The essence of the witch as a young girl of no more than fifteen cowered naked on the horsehair seat opposite them, whimpering. Marlow was shocked at her guise, but then realized this must have been the age at which her sorcery had turned wicked. Had she sealed her infernal fate while dancing skyclad?

  The demon beside him pointed at her. “Stop that sound. I’ve no tolerance for weepers.” Her lips sealed tightly shut, of her free will or the demon’s command Marlowe could not tell.

  He understood he must be dead, but inside the coach, facing the cowering figure of Radha Ó Braonáin, he felt every bit as corporal as ever he had. He smelled the musty confines of the carriage, felt the hard upholstered seat beneath his legs. He was still clothed…and looking down realized he wore not the fancy outfit of the play’s Chorus but the very clothes he’d had on the night his soul had been taken.

  Three names had been called, yet there were but two newly dead in the carriage.

  Marlowe dared to find his voice. “Where is Tom? Is he not dead as well?”

  The Right Hand of Satan smiled, showing perfect white, sharp teeth. “Quite dead. But the shield knot made from ink infused with the bloodspell of a certain Dr. Dee and his dutiful daughter forbade me from claiming him. He’d died once already in any case, and his path elsewhere was already set. Still, I might have beguiled him with a bit of glamour into making a last-minute bargain had the charm not protected him.”

  Marlowe dared yet another question. “What’s become of the buachloch?”

  The demon’s musical laughter floated around the confines of the coach, lifting the stringy dark hair of the young witch and caressing Marlowe’s cheek. “Das macht nichts. It has served its purpose.”

  Mephistopheles slipped his hand around Marlowe’s thigh and gripped it tightly. Marlowe felt the blood in his veins turn to ice. He cut a sidelong look at his companion. “It’s s-said the Devil has a b-barbed shaft.” He couldn’t stop himself from shaking.

  The fires blazed up in Mephistopheles’ summer-blue eyes. “Perhaps you'll find out.” He leaned toward the carriage window and called up to the dullahan. “Come, let’s be off!”

  Claire woke as from a nightmare, head splitting and ears ringing. The coach was exiting its basement enclosure. She could feel the pressure dropping as her ears popped. Tasting blood, she touched her fingers to her face—she was bleeding from the nose as if she’d been punched. As the coach withdrew from the earthly plane, she felt like a fish in a tank watching a cat pulling its paws out of the water. Less and less of it was visible. And then with a shudder, she was alone in the basement.

  Dazed, she couldn’t get the terrifying face and voice of the beautiful young man…or whatever he was…out of her head. When he’d faced her directly his camouflage was perfectly in place, but when he faced away and turned his attention to Bayard or Tom, she’d glimpsed the skull and bones beneath his pale transparent skin. But what chilled her most was that she now knew him to be the one who’d captivated her attention before the play began. She’d actually spoken to, and been fleetingly touched by, a supernatural creature of some kind. It was he, she now assumed, who’d created the destruction raging upstairs. Claire began to shiver.

  Screaming voices pulled her back to immediate danger as smoke rolled down the narrow stairs in thick pillows of black and gray, red-hot flames from the engulfed lobby at its heels. The building groaned around her as a section of the ceiling gave way, right over the spot where the cornerstone was lodged. />
  Gasping and coughing, Claire reeled to her feet and sprinted headlong for the back door, jumping across splits in the tiles as the floor bucked and cracked underneath her feet. A sinkhole opened behind her and nearby pillars gave way, falling into its void. She flung herself at the back door, pulling the handle and struggling to push it open. For a heartstopping moment it resisted her, then gave way, spilling her face down into the alley behind the theater. Barefoot, her gray suit torn at the knees, hair in her face, she stumbled blindly down the alley away from the theater and the roar of the fire.

  She made it out into the street, hacking through smoke-scalded lungs, just in time to see flames shooting out the top windows of the building as glass exploded and rained down on the people below. It was too much to take in. Claire felt like she couldn’t get her breath. The two-storey Janus was an inferno, engulfed from its foundations to the attic in sheets of flame. People could die in fires like this. Her mind reeled, remembering that some people had already died in it.

  The fire blazed out of control, so hot it seemed the firefighters and their pitiful streams of water could do little to stop it. The streets around the burning wreck were filled with terrified patrons, gawkers, police, fire trucks, and emergency vehicles jammed together, their wheels up on the sidewalks.

  On all sides, panicked theatergoers who’d made it to safety huddled in the streets or were stretched out being tended to by paramedics. Of Bayard or Tom there was no sign. Among the ambulances pulling in and spilling their crews into the melee, Claire spotted Paul. She searched the faces in the crowd and saw Addie and Morris among a throng out in the middle of the street half a block down. Addie slid to the ground in a crouch, her legs giving out. She sobbed loudly, her face streaked with tears and soot. Claire simply stood where she was, overwhelmed. Her mind was shutting down as she watched the beautiful orange lights rippling up and down the sides of building, swirling in gusts as the night air fanned the flames. It was like watching the Aurora, only more concentrated. And hotter.

  At the edge of the crowd, the shade that had once been Christopher Marlowe watched impassively as frantic humans scrambled around the scene like ants, trying to make order out of the carefully orchestrated chaos. His writer’s mind appreciated the contradiction in terms.

  “A most satisfactory fire,” said the honey-smooth voice of his equally ephemeral companion.

  “Aye, it is that,” he agreed, becoming more detached by the second. They stood silently, two shadows at the periphery of the action. “It was a good play as well. My best.”

  The other laughed, a musical sound in counterpoint to the harsh human voices that shouted and screamed over the wailing of sirens.

  “I can show you a better conflagration, if you like. A friend of mine, one Nero by name, set a little town alight some years ago. Would you like to see it, as it happened?”

  “You can do that? Yes, I would. Perhaps I might write about it.”

  The other draped his arm around the shoulders of his shorter companion and drew him away from the scene of destruction, chuckling. “Be assured, I shall be your perfect companion.”

  * * * *

  Claire did not remember driving home. She sat in her Honda, in the carport, trying to find the motivation to open the door and get out. She’d finally connected with Paul at the fire and offered her services, but he’d taken one look at her slightly manic, disheveled appearance and ordered her home. So here she sat.

  She had no coping mechanism for what had happened. None at all. The fire itself was bad enough, but knowing what had caused it—that was so far out of her realm of comprehension she feared she might need a heavy dose of duloxetine from the men in white coats. Otherwise she was going to start screaming until she was too hoarse to make a sound.

  At least she’d verified that Addie and Morris were safe. She wondered if the rest of the cast and crew were all right. Concentrating on the individual people she knew and whether they’d survived brought her slowly round to the real world, and real people, pushing phantoms of the night for the time being into the far reaches of her brain. Later, she knew, she’d have to deal with that stuff, but not now. She took a deep breath and got out of the car.

  Safely inside, she padded barefoot to her mother’s bedroom and poked her head in the doorway. Asleep. That was good; it meant she didn’t have to answer the inevitable question of “How did it go tonight?” She might not ever be able to answer that question.

  Numb, she made herself go through the motions a normal person would do after surviving a crisis. She peeled off her clothes and shook out her hair. Removing her mother’s gold pin, she rolled up the ruined gray suit and stuffed it in the trash. Then she got in the shower and stood under the hot water much too long, having a hard time finding the motivation to turn off the water and get out. But eventually she dried off and dressed in her comfort clothes: baggy sweatshirt and loose jeans, thick socks on her feet.

  There was no way she was going to bed, so she wandered into the kitchen and put on water for tea. Closing her mind off from the hell that had erupted in the theater basement, she focused her thoughts on the play, trying to pinpoint the moment where things had turned weird. The fourth act had been fine, so obviously it was somewhere in the final act. She replayed the last few scenes in her mind. Tom had delivered his important soliloquy perfectly until…the image of Morris’s entrance with his minions swam into her brain. There. They’d hung back, as he’d trod, heavy footed, downstage toward Tom. Orin. Whoever. It was pretty clear to her now that the creature who’d cheekily played with her before the show had taken possession of Morris at that point. And what had Tom’s next line been? “Art thou indeed Mephistopheles?” And Bayard had known, too, at that same moment.

  The kettle shrilled, and her heart slugged against her chest for shocked seconds. Claire let her breath out and poured water over the bag of green tea with lemon. For most of her life, from adolescence onward, Claire had not believed in a god or the devil or salvation or heaven, or even the possibility of an afterlife, but this evening her denying senses had been witness to things she could not explain. Wasn’t that what the beautiful demon had accused, that she’d sealed herself in a shell that kept away the Dark and the Inexplicable? It was bound to rupture, that kind of rigid hold on one’s psyche. So what now? Was she certifiable?

  She took her cup of tea and went to check on her mother again. She slipped into the bedroom quietly and sat down on the edge of the bed.

  “Mom? I’m home, sorry I was a little late.” Her mother gave no sign if she heard. “Mom?”

  Claire put down the cup and touched her mother’s uncovered shoulder. Cold, and still. She knew what dead flesh felt like, especially when it had been in that state for hours. Her mother had likely died shortly after she’d arrived at the theater. An unspeakable sadness filled her mind and heart. She was now officially alone. Sitting on the edge of the bed, she wished her mother a silent farewell. Then she went to her room, pulled her cell phone out of her purse, opened her contacts list, and called Paul.

  Chapter 20

  Three weeks later

  It was raining. Not a hard rain, but a light drizzle that wet the leaves of the shrubbery outside Dr. Patel’s office. The glistening branches half-covered the room’s only window, affording a limited view of the parking lot outside. Claire’s mind was drifting, watching the drops falling on individual leaves.

  “Claire, are you with me?” Dr. Patel’s voice was gentle, but insistent.

  Claire tuned back in. She’d been coming to the company therapist twice a week since the death of her mother on the night when the black hole of her worst fears had opened up and swallowed any sense of normalcy she’d ever owned. These days she was someone else, not the Claire who had naively taken a volunteer job as part of the stage crew for an acting company. Not the Claire who’d lost the only person she’d maybe really loved to another woman, and certainly not the Claire who’d seen time freeze in its tracks while the Right Hand of Satan had come for
the lives of people she thought she knew but obviously hadn’t. No, not that Claire. This new one got up and went to work and duly attended therapy sessions and tried not to think too hard about what the next day, or even the next hour, would bring. This new Claire was finding her way in the world, determined to cling to it as best she could.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, shifting her focus back to the young woman in the business suit who sat comfortably in the cushioned chair opposite her. How could someone be that relaxed while on the job? Claire wanted her secret. “I was just watching the rain.” She liked Dr. Siri Patel, who didn’t look like she could be more than five or six years older than herself. They’d established an easy, non-confrontational relationship, and Claire wondered now why she’d been so dead-set against coming for help in the first place. Paul was right, she should have done it earlier. So far, their discussions remained mostly superficial, at least from Claire’s point of view, but that was all right. There were parts of her psyche damaged beyond repair, but she had vowed to herself that in order to have this new Claire who functioned in the real world and went shopping and paid her bills on time, those unthinkable moments seared into her brain by flaming blue eyes would never be allowed to see the light of day in this safe little office tucked into the administrative building. She would allow Dr. Patel to probe anything else she felt was useful, but access to that one segment of old Claire’s experience was locked away out of reach. She’d claimed at first that she couldn’t remember clearly what happened the night of the fire, and after a few weeks that assertion was becoming more truth and less deception. But there were two people with whom she was willing to talk about the Janus fire. When she’d felt ready, she’d finally called them up.