by Jim Ware
Chapter Nine
Tremors
In the days that followed, Morgan’s life fell into a grueling routine.
When he wasn’t at school he was in the tower lab, sweating over his workbench, grinding, boiling, mixing, stirring, distilling. When he wasn’t in the lab he was lying in his bed, drowsing fitfully or staring into the silent and empty darkness. When he wasn’t doing any of these things, he was taking his meals with the Ariellos and Peter Alcuin. The Reverend quickly discovered that dinnertime was the only time he could hope to catch up with the boy.
When Moira asked Morgan what he was doing night after night in the church tower, his answer was always the same: “Homework.” This always drew an accusatory look from Eny, but he ignored her disapproving scowls and frowns. “It’s too lonely in the house,” he’d say. “I’d rather study in the tower until my mom comes home.”
But Mavis didn’t come home. A week went by, and still she remained in the hospital, her condition gradually worsening. Morgan saw little of her during this time. He knew he ought to visit more often, but the sight of her thinning hair and hollow eyes pained him. He was keenly aware, too, that he was disobeying her wishes by proceeding with his alchemical experiments, and he couldn’t bear to face her with this offense on his conscience. But neither could he afford to stop what he was doing. He was convinced that her life depended on it.
On Sunday morning, long before the first worshippers began to arrive at St. Halistan’s for the nine o’clock service, Morgan jumped out of bed, threw on some clothes, and dashed across the street to the tower. Jacob’s Ladder was gray and lifeless as he passed it on his way up the stairs. Gray, too, were the pale shafts piercing the dusky emptiness of the lab as he poked his head up through the trap door—the strange fog had not yet released its grip on the town of Santa Piedra. But though the world seemed dull and dim on this silent and solemn morning, Morgan’s heart beat high with a rising hope. He trembled with anticipation as he surveyed his litter-strewn workbench. Today, he told himself, is the day.
Reaching under the table, he drew out the sealed jar containing his precious solution and held it up to the light. It, too, was of a flat gray hue—just what all the books had taught him to expect. The succession of colors had unfolded according to the specifications of the adepts: black to yellow, yellow to pink, pink to rainbow, rainbow to green. The last transformation had been from green to gray. Only the final step remained. Following the instructions set forth in Edward Kelly’s translation of the Hermetica, he poured six ounces of the mixture into a glass alembic. Placing the alembic over the Bunsen burner, he lit the flame and slowly turned up the heat.
Eny, too, had risen early that morning. Next to fiddling on the tower stairs or down in the Cave of the Hands, she liked best to sit thinking at dawn in the sanctuary of St. Halistan’s Church, watching the stately figures in the tall stained glass windows emerge from the darkness and quicken to life by slow, imperceptible stages. She loved to see them flame with cherry-reds, flash with cobalt blues, and glitter with sparks of gold in the rising sun. Even on a morning like this, when the light outside was dull, there was something reassuring in the solemnity of their muted colors and the firmness of their solid black outlines. They were like old friends: the fisherman with his dragnet, the sower with his grain bag, the woman seeking her lost coin, the father embracing his prodigal son.
On this particular Sunday she had been at it since the first birds began piping in the tops of the trees. She was thinking hard about the things she’d seen out on La Punta Lira: the crow, the old woman, the ominous figure in the mist. All week long she had pondered these mysteries and tried to grasp their meaning. Now, ensconced in a corner of one of the long polished pews, she was attempting to banish them from her thoughts by fixing her mind upon the familiar images in the windows. But it was no use. Despite her best efforts, the portents she had witnessed continued to hang over her head like a dark cloud.
She was thinking, too, about Simon Brach. Eny had been thoroughly taken with the man since their first meeting. It was partly the music, of course: Never before had she heard fiddling like Simon’s. But it was more than that. There was something different about the new church custodian, something that warmed her on the inside and encouraged her to trust. Morgan might be skeptical, she thought, but Simon would understand. Simon would listen if she told him what she had seen. Maybe she would tell him—when the time was right.
Her thoughts were interrupted by a sudden shock. It rattled the windows and set the great arched rafters groaning above her head. She looked up to see the big chandeliers swaying slightly in the darkness. A door opened at one side of the sanctuary, and her father came in, keys jangling, to switch on the lights and open the sanctuary for the morning service.
He grinned when he saw her sitting there. “Nothing to worry about. It was only a tremor.”
Morgan felt it too. Just as the pallid gray mixture was beginning to bubble and seethe inside the glass globe, a ripple of clinks and chinks went shuddering down the ranks of pots and jars ranged along his workbench. The creak of wooden beams drew his attention up into the shadows near the ceiling. Then the walls of the tower shook and the workbench lurched. The alembic tipped, fell, and shattered. Morgan held his breath and braced himself for another jolt. But it never came. Just a tremor, he thought. Gingerly he took a new alembic from a box on the floor and filled it with another six ounces of the solution.
Eny was still studying the pictures in the windows when the final notes of the opening hymn had faded into silence. She maintained her concentration as the people around her rustled and rumbled back into their seats. Not until Rev. Alcuin was mounting the pulpit did she direct her attention to the chancel, watching with grave expectancy as the minister climbed the steps, adjusted his glasses, and opened the great leather-bound Bible. A hush fell over the congregation as he began to read:
My father was a wandering Aramaean, and he went down to Egypt and sojourned there, few in number.
“Wandering,” the Reverend repeated, looking out at the people over the rims of his silver-framed spectacles. “Went down. Sojourned. Few in number. These are the elements of ancient Israel’s earliest confession of faith. We should pay close attention to them. For we are all wandering sojourners. We are all small and few in number.”
He went down into Egypt and sojourned there, few in number; and there he became a nation, great, mighty, and populous.
“You’ve heard it said,” Rev. Alcuin went on, “that what goes up must come down. This passage turns that old saw on its head. It suggests that what goes down will come up. It declares that the last must be first. It tells us that weakness is a kind of strength. It explains how a boy like David could bring down a giant with nothing but a sling and a stone.”
He paused and took off his glasses. “I’ve seen this principle put to the proof this week, my friends. I’ve seen it in the face of a woman—a longtime member of this church—who at this very moment lies stricken in a hospital bed. As her strength ebbs, her spirit grows. Her frailty is the measure of her faith. The more she’s shaken, the firmer her foundation becomes. You have only to look at her to know it.”
As Rev. Alcuin spoke, Eny’s eyes strayed again to the pictures in the windows. I wish Morgan was here to hear this, she thought.
Morgan was up in his lab, far above the heads of the people in the church, reaching out into the vast unknown, seeking to lay hold of the healing power that lay hidden within the elements and behind the stars. With unwavering eye he monitored the guttering flame as it sparked and flared beneath the Bunsen burner. With bated breath he watched the boiling liquid inside the alembic become a tiny tempest of swirling steam. With pounding pulse he saw its gray color grow lighter and whiter by the minute. He bit his lip and adjusted the heating element. A fire of very low temperature.
Eny was the last to leave the church at the end of t
he service. Simon Brach was waiting for her at the door under the tower stairs.
“Well now, missy,” he said, “it looks like I’ve got the afternoon off. What do you say to a bit of music?”
For a moment she stood staring up into his face, her heart thumping like a drum. Should I tell him? she wondered. How do you tell a person you barely know that you’ve seen a giant? The blood rushed into her cheeks. Her hands went numb, and she felt as if she were choking. But then Simon smiled, and at the sight of his bent nose and sparkling eyes her heart was suddenly filled with an inexplicable lightness. Fear and apprehension vanished like morning mist.
“I’ll get my violin,” she said. “It won’t take a minute!”
Before long the two of them were seated together high on the stone steps, just below the landing under the stained-glass window. As they opened their cases and rosined their bows, the sun broke briefly through the clouds and Jacob’s Ladder flashed with fleeting color. Then, as the brightness faded, Simon took up his fiddle and glanced at Eny out of one eye.
“Do you know ‘The Silver Spire’?” he said.
Without waiting for an answer, he touched bow to string and launched straight into the tune. She tried to follow, but so frantic was the pace he set that it was all she could do to keep up. Sparks of light seemed to fly from his bow as it lashed the air. The clear, sweet tones pouring from his instrument leaped and danced in the open spaces above their heads.
“Usually,” he shouted above the melody’s stream, “I take this one straight into ‘Rakish Paddy.’”
And with that he jumped from one tune to the next without a hitch or pause. He closed his eyes, and his foot began to tap. The thin gray wisps atop his balding head swayed in time with the strands of horsehair streaming from the tip of his bow. There was a light on the stairway and a strangely pleasant fragrance in the air as the wheels of the music rolled on and on, expanding outward like ripples on a pond, gaining momentum at every turn. Never in her life had Eny heard such playing.
Morgan heard it too. Up in his laboratory he removed the alembic from the flame and paused to listen. From far below the fierce and frantic melody ascended the stairs, penetrated the walls, and burst upon his ear. It pounded at the door of his brain and sought admittance to the innermost chamber of his heart. It seemed to be singing two words over and over again: Let go.
Let go of what? thought Morgan, and even as the words passed through his mind he felt his fingers losing their grip upon the alembic, allowing it to slip from his hand. He caught himself just in time to save it from falling. That’s when he looked down and realized for the first time what his experiment had produced.
A powder. A thin layer of fine, white powder that lined the narrow connecting tube and coated the globular walls of the alembic’s secondary chamber. A fine white substance of a powdery yet waxy consistency, displaying a markedly crystalline quality.
He peered at the glass. He turned it this way and that in the dim and dubious light. Was this success? Was this the long-sought Philosophers’ Stone? The Elixir Vitae, the Salt of Life, the universal healing agent—in it all the power of the stars? The thought made him quiver with excitement. He had done everything by the book, and everything had gone according to plan. But now he had reached an impasse. On his own he could go no further. He lacked the necessary equipment to verify the results. Without athanor or crucible he could not test the powder’s virtues. There was only one thing he could do. There was only one person who could give him the answers he needed. He had nowhere else to turn. Madame Medea.
By the time he reached the landing at the top of the stone stairs, Simon and Eny were playing an entirely different sort of music: a slow and solemn air in a minor key. Morgan stopped and stood watching them, sweating and shaking, both hands clasped tightly around the smooth and glassy surface of the alembic. It seemed to him that an unearthly light hovered over the heads of the musicians as their bows swept in unison over the singing strings. He wanted to speak. He wanted to shout Eureka! He wanted to tell someone what he’d done. But as the music slowed and the light fell upon Eny’s face, a different sort of thought occurred to him. She doesn’t care. She won’t understand.
Then Eny struck up another tune. It was a melody Morgan had heard before: “The May Morning Dew.” She played it through once; she played it again; and then Simon, in a haunting tenor voice, began to sing:
The house I once lived in,
There’s not a stone upon stone,
And all round the garden
The weeds, they have grown;
And all the kind neighbors
That ever I knew,
With the red rose they’ve withered
In the May Morning Dew.
The old man’s voice drifted up the stairway until it passed into darkness and silence. Then the music ceased. In the stillness a spark of light flitted past the window, causing Jacob’s ladder to flash like a chain of gold. Then Morgan, like one waking from a dream, roused himself, thrust the alembic into his shirt, and dashed down the stairs past the two startled fiddlers.
The stairwell shuddered as the street door closed behind him. The window frame shivered and shook. Outside the window the brief spark died. And a shadow, like that of a huge hand, fell over the stairs.
Simon looked at Eny and shook his head. “Giants in the land,” he said.
Part 2
Chapter Ten
The Green Island
It was Monday, a close and heavy afternoon. School was out, and the day was drawing almost imperceptibly to its cold, gray conclusion. Eny sat on an outcropping of rock high above the waters of Laguna Verde, staring out into the folds of dark and light within the mantle of fog that lay upon the inlet. She was pondering the words of Simon Brach—the last words he had spoken to her on that never-to-be-forgotten Sunday of fiddling on the stairs: Giants in the land.
Never once during that sublime session had she stopped to tell the old man about her fears and apprehensions. She’d never had the chance: There hadn’t been a minute for anything but the music. At the time she might have regarded that as a cause for irritation—if she’d had the presence of mind to think about it. But today it didn’t matter. For one thing, the music itself had been more than enough for her, filled as it was with exhortations and encouragements and illuminations all its own. For another thing, it was clear now that she didn’t need to tell Simon anything. Simon already knew about the giants in the land.
That’s why she was here, sitting on this rock, straining her eyes into the heart of the shifting haze over the ocean. Simon’s words and Simon’s tunes had convinced her that there was only one way to learn what she needed to know. Somehow she had to find the courage to face her fears. She had to return to La Punta Lira and seek the answers for herself.
Turning away from the sea, she reached into the pocket of her hooded sweatshirt and pulled out her newest plaything. It was a sling for throwing stones: She had made it herself the previous night under the inspiration of Rev. Alcuin’s reminder of the story of David and Goliath.
Scanning the ground at her feet, she bent and picked up a smooth, round pebble. For a few seconds she sat hefting it in the palm of her hand; then, satisfied with its shape, size, and weight, she folded it carefully into the sling’s leather patch. Gathering the two straps into the palm of her left hand, she reached up and began swinging the sling over her head. Three times she swung it; four, five, six. At the right moment she released one of the straps and let the stone fly. Far out over the ocean it soared in a gentle arch, graceful as a bird in flight.
Out where the gulls swoop and the fish leap it dropped with a tiny splash into the face of a sloping green wave. Eny saw it fall.
But then she saw something else as well. Just above the place where it entered the water, at the level of the hidden horizon, she caught a glimpse of a spot of copper
y light, like the flame of a candle in a clouded mirror. Sunset, she knew, was at least an hour off, and yet this light had all the ruddy hues of the sinking sun.
As she watched, the light flashed brightly, then drew in upon itself and changed color. In the next instant it had become a tiny pulsing point of intense whiteness. The fog thinned, shredded, and tore apart, opening a small but clear window upon the ocean and the sky beyond the edge of the world—the first patch of blue sky she had seen in over a week.
In that window, hovering over the horizon, the point of white light hung small and serene in the blue of space, like the morning star, casting down its radiance upon the surface of the sea in a gentle silver shower. And just below it, green as an emerald, green as hills under rain in the grass-clad spring, shimmered something like a mountain in the midst of the ocean, a bit of distant verdure floating on the face of the deep.
Eny jumped up and rubbed her eyes. “The Green Island in the West!” she whispered.
Without thinking, she took to the trail, ran down the cliff-side, and plunged, jeans, sneakers, and all, into the gently breaking waves, seeking a clearer view of the shining object floating on the line between earth and sky. But in the next moment the hole in the gray curtain sucked itself shut again. The light behind the veil trembled and wavered. Then it went out altogether.
How long she stood there in the bubbling surf, gazing out to sea, Eny couldn’t have said. But when at last she came to herself, it was with an odd feeling of having reached an unsought and unforeseen conclusion. It seemed to her that she had seen the Hidden Isle of Inisfail: the land of the sun’s going, the destined resting place of the Stone called Lia Fail. It was a vision, according to her mother’s stories, that comes only to the few, and no more than once in a lifetime. But why had it chosen to reveal itself to her? And what did it mean?