With April clinging to my arm, I began to move down the slippery face of the hill, heading toward the basin where Madeline knelt. Suddenly, April drew her breath in sharply and squeezed my arm. I looked in the direction she was pointing and saw Garth emerge from the woods, perhaps fifty yards away. He immediately took in the scene, motioned to us with a single, terse wave of his hand, then began moving down himself, angling to his left in an attempt to approach Mad from the rear.
But Madeline wasn't going to be taken by surprise. Suddenly, as if sensing our presence, she lifted her head. I winced when I saw that the rain and wind had stripped the bandage from her forehead, exposing the cross-shaped wound. Blood oozed from the raw flesh between the crusted stitches, mixed with rain and covered her face in a pink wash. Shaking, I raised my arms-more as a calming gesture than to show I was unarmed-and continued moving toward her, keeping my body in the line of fire between Madeline and April. Garth had almost reached the bottom of the embankment. He stopped to wait for us, and we cautiously converged on Madeline together.
When we were about ten yards away from Madeline the wind abruptly abated even further, until there was only the steady drumbeat of the rain, much lighter now. I had an eerie, chilling sensation that the storm was no more than a special effect; the tens of thousands of buildings, the millions of people, the hundreds of square miles surrounding us, were a backdrop for a movie. Our movie. All the master shots had been made, and now we had arrived at center stage. The camera was moving in for an Extreme Close-Up. I shook off a chill.
"Please don't come closer," Mad said evenly. Her voice was soft, but could be heard clearly in air that now, almost stripped of wind, suddenly felt too thin, drained of oxygen.
April, Garth and I squatted in a semicircle before Mad.
"Give me the gun, Dr. Jones," Garth said quietly. "You're hurt. Let us take care of you."
There was no answer, and Garth started to reach out toward her. Madeline tensed and straightened to show us that the barrel of the gun was turned inward, pressed against her stomach. Garth slowly sank back down on his haunches.
"That's a.38 Police Special, Dr. Jones," Garth continued in the same quiet, even voice. "If you shoot yourself like that, you're going to put a big hole in yourself. But you may not die right away. Don't do it; don't gut-shoot yourself. You'll suffer terrible pain, and there'll be nothing we can do to help you."
"Please, let's go, Dr. Jones," April said. "Come back with us. This is a bad place. I feel it; you feel it."
Madeline looked at April for a long time. "It's the right place, April," she said at last.
"Talk to us, Mad," I said. "Get it out of your system."
"You talk," she replied in a dark, stranger's voice.
"Can we go someplace out of the rain? We're cold."
Madeline shook her head and seemed to tighten her grip on the gun.
"I'll talk, Mad," I continued quickly. "I think you want me to." I took a deep breath, wiped the water off my face and formed a shield over my eyes with my left hand. "You saved my life last night-for the second time. The first time was when I was floating in Smathers' fish tank. You also saved Kathy's life-after you found out what had been done to her."
"I don't understand, Robert," April said in a shuddering tremolo. "If Dr. Jones is Esobus, wouldn't she have known everything the coven was doing from the time they planned to do it?"
"Knowing Mad as I do, I don't think so," I replied to April, at the same time watching Madeline carefully-very conscious of the gun in her hands. "In fact, I think that, of all the members of the coven, Madeline-or Esobus-knew the least. Like I said, she is a busy woman, traveling all over the world in her role as a leading researcher in cosmology. I think Mad began this coven business as some kind of experiment. One day she discovered it had all gotten out of hand, but she didn't know what to do about it. Am I right, Mad?"
Madeline said nothing; instead, she raised her face to the sky-as though she were looking or listening for something. She made no sound, and the rest of her body didn't move; with all the water on her, it was impossible to tell for certain, but I was sure she was crying.
"You see," I continued, "Esobus' image was an all-powerful, mystical and supersecretive inspiration. But Esobus was a leader only in name, not a person the other coven members could sit down and plan things with. The coven meetings Esobus attended probably consisted almost entirely of ritual-there was no practical business discussed. Besides, Esobus was a fraud-not a ceremonial magician at all. But only Madeline and Smathers knew that."
A giant chill squeezed me in its icy hand and shook me. April held me tightly until it had passed.
"In Mad's mind, she was probably conducting an experiment in witchcraft that would finally reveal some kind of truth about the occult to a very suspicious scientific community," I continued, forcing the blurred words out through stiff lips that felt paralyzed. "These were the same people who'd laughed at her because of her ideas about astrology. Madeline's obsessed with the occult; in setting this whole thing in motion, she saw herself as a kind of pioneer. She's been looking for the lost Atlantis of the mind, if you will, but she found that she couldn't control it. Maybe she couldn't even decide if she should control it, considering the fact that it was an experiment; for a little while, she may have had trouble deciding whether to remain an aloof scientific observer, or intervene. Fortunately for Kathy and me, the human being in her won out over the dispassionate scientist. But right up until this morning, she was still trying to hedge her bets and get out of this whole."
The wind was rising again, as if the storm had regrouped its forces and was returning for another major assault.
"I'm so sorry," Madeline whispered softly. Incredibly, her voice could be heard clearly in the rising cacophony, as though her words had slipped through cracks in the wall of wind. "So sorry."
"A big question," I said, raising my voice in order to be heard. "I doubt that you were originally interested in witchcraft. What's the connection between you and Smathers? How did you find out that Smathers was a ceremonial magician, and how did you get him to set up the coven for you?"
"He was my. . lover," Madeline said in a voice that was suddenly strangled. "I was his mistress for months before I found out about. . the other things. Then I became intrigued with the question of what would happen if a coven of ceremonial magicians was formed-and with the problem of how I could become a part of it. Vincent was. . amused by the idea; we planned the Esobus thing together. You've guessed the rest. Vincent took care of all the planning. I really didn't know about …" Her voice trailed off.
"Smathers was a madman," I said, making no attempt to hide the disgust I felt. "And he was a pervert. How could you ever get involved with a man like that?"
"Powerful," Mad said distantly, her voice still mysteriously overriding the wind. "Vincent was … so strange and powerful. You wouldn't understand, Mongo."
But I thought I did. The darkness beyond the light of science, the void of night that Mad had been trying to explore, had finally swallowed her up.
Madeline slowly rose to her feet, and we rose with her. For a moment I thought-hoped-that it was finished, that a catharsis had been achieved and Madeline was ready to give up the gun and come with us. It was a false hope. She still held the gun in a reverse position, its barrel pressed even more tightly into her stomach, one thumb resting against the trigger. Again she raised her face to the sky and cocked her head, as though listening to voices in the storm that only she could hear.
"I've seen a lot of things in the past few weeks, Mad," I said quickly, driven by a sudden, terrible need to fill the space between us with words, as if I could filibuster away the dreaded sound of a gunshot muffled by Madeline's flesh. "Maybe most of the things I've witnessed are beyond scientific measurement. People like you and Krowl have strange talents, and most of us don't know how to deal with them. But some of these things bite if you don't handle them correctly, and you finally came to realize that. As much as you kept
telling yourself you were simply being a scientist by keeping a foot in both camps, you wanted out; you wanted to be saved from the coven you'd created. You had a nervous breakdown because of your guilt-right after you'd made the recording that saved Kathy's life. My God, you've been dropping clues on me all along with those references to the Wizard of Oz. You once told me you were interested in the pursuit of knowledge, not personal power; it started to come together for me when I saw that sign in Esobus' cubicle. But you were never willing to come all the way out. You kept hoping right up to the end that you could run around putting Band-Aids on something that had to be amputated."
"Shut up, Mongo," Garth snapped. "You're being too hard on her. She's also helped a lot of people."
Madeline shuddered with cold, slowly shook her head. "No. Let Mongo finish. He knows I. . need to hear it all."
The catharsis would come, I thought, and felt immense relief. That was what Mad seemed to be telling me: say it all, get it out in the open, and she would come back with us.
"You ran back to the cubicle in the factory building because you had to retrieve the tape you'd put on to cover your movement to the other end of the catwalk." I smiled tentatively and tried to establish eye contact, but Mad's gaze kept slipping away. I considered trying to knock the gun away, but rejected the idea. I couldn't assume that risk. "You took the tape off and threw it away somewhere into the darkness. A fleeing man might have stuck a knife into you, but it's highly unlikely he'd take the time-or be accurate enough-to carve a perfect cross on your forehead. No, Mad. The cross is your own, self-inflicted, mark of Cain: disfigurement as a form of expiation. It isn't enough, Mad; it's dues time for the Wizard of Oz."
"I couldn't live with it any longer, Mongo," Mad said evenly.
"I know. Now you don't have to. And Garth will tell you there are extenuating circumstances. You've saved lives."
I began to seriously doubt the old chestnut about a man's entire past flashing before his eyes at the moment of sudden, violent death. Or perhaps I wasn't really dying, because it wasn't that way at all. Quite the opposite. I was seeing things that had not yet happened, as though the thunderous explosion had blown my own book of shadows open to pages that had not yet been written.
Now Mad looked at me directly. She smiled as she said something, but she had lost control of the wind, and her words were lost. I watched her lips and thought she said, "Thank you," or "I love you"; or it may have been simply "Goodbye, Mongo."
Garth was with April, Kathy and me at the zoo, laughing at the orangutan. Ironically, Garth-the biggest and strongest-seemed to be the only one who had sustained a lasting injury. He was hobbling around with his right foot and ankle in a walking cast.
Madeline suddenly stiffened, as though an invisible metal rod had risen from the ground and skewered her. She flipped the gun around so that it was facing away from her, then raised both arms above her head. She slid up on the skewer, balancing on her toes, extending her arms even higher, bowing her head until her chin rested on her chest.
Now the camera began to grind in ultra-slow motion. Madeline's body had become a ramrod-straight, steel-tipped spear thrusting itself up into the air. She was offering herself, and I knew she was going to be taken.
My brother knew too. Garth and I leaped as one toward April.
But we were moving so slowly, divers straining every muscle to trudge along the bottom of the sea.
April and I had finished making love while Kathy napped. We lay in each others arms, watching snow gather on evergreens outside some mountain lodge. It struck me that months had passed, and we were still together.
I desperately hoped it was more than death's anesthetic dream.
Straining, but still moving in slow motion. Garth grabbed one of April's arms; I grabbed the other, and we dived.
There was an exquisite sensation of floating, totally out of control and thus free of the terrible responsibility of thinking and making decisions. There was nothing to do but ride.
As I slowly flipped over in the air, I saw the bolt of lightning poke its sharp head from its black home. It seemed to hesitate, looking around. Finally it saw Madeline and began to drift lazily down a jagged route toward the gun in her hand.
I wanted to shout a warning to my friend, tell her to throw the gun to one side and float with us away from the lightning. There was time; everything was happening so unbelievably slowly. But when I tried to yell, my voice was no more than a deep rumble, like sounds from a record being played at very slow speed. I could see the words come out of my mouth, explode and stick to my face.
Beyond my horror was a childlike fascination with how pretty everything was-the way the lightning passed through the air, firing the surrounding molecules into a lovely, shimmering white glow. The smell of ozone was pleasant in my nostrils, something like burning leaves on a cold fall afternoon.
But I was losing sight of the spectacle as I rotated in the air. Garth and I bumped into each other, then drifted apart again as we both tried to protect April with our bodies.
I was actually auditioning for an orchestra-but not the New Jersey Symphony. Too bad. It was a pickup group of extremely talented Julliard students interested in playing modern music. There was plenty of Boulez and Messiaen, but no Tchaikovsky. The incredibly complex rhythms were driving me crazy, but I was having a perfectly marvelous time. April was sitting in the first row of the auditorium, smiling broadly at me while Kathy excitedly pounded her mothers thigh.
Garth was in the back of the auditorium, grudgingly-very grudgingly-nodding his appreciation.
At least, the bone-cracking, wet cold was gone. It had been supplanted by a sharp, tingling sensation that hurt my joints, but had an overall warming, liquid feel. The electricity coursing through my body was oddly invigorating, and made me feel as though I could run for hours without getting tired.
If only I could stop floating and get my feet on the ground.
I'd lost sight of Mad during one half turn. Now, as I came out of a slow spin, I could see that the lightning had completed its journey to the barrel of the gun. Mad was softly aglow, like a fluorescent bulb; she would have been beautiful, except for the way the electricity made her hair stand out from her head, each individual strand vibrating like a sliver-thin tuning fork.
Then Madeline began to burn, and I didn't want to look anymore. I didn't want to remember her that way.
I closed my eyes. Holding tight to both April and Garth, I let myself float away into the velvet darkness behind my eyes.
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An Affair Of Sorcerers m-3 Page 29