Bedtime Story

by Robert J. Wiersema

  “There are probably worse ways to spend an afternoon.”

  “I like my Kobe beef as much as the next girl,” she said. “What about you? How were your meetings?”

  “All right,” I said. “Actually, I spent most of the day at a private library. I’m trying to find out more about the author of this book I’ve got. It’s my son’s …”

  “How old’s your son?” she asked with a smile.

  “He’s eleven.” It felt strange to mention David to her, and for a moment I couldn’t see his face in my mind.

  “Eleven’s a good age.”

  “Yeah, it is. Do you have kids?”

  She shook her head. “No, not yet. Too much work, too much travel, not enough time at home.”

  “Yeah, I can see that.” Sipping my drink.

  “Why didn’t you just go online?” I must have seemed confused. “For your research, about this book.”

  “I did,” I said. “I tried. There wasn’t a whole lot there. And then I heard about this library in New York that had bought all the author’s papers.” I shrugged. “I thought I’d check them out.”

  “Did you find what you were looking for?” Her every sentence seemed flirtatious—genuinely interested, but playful. Teasing.

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “There’s a lot of stuff there to go through.” I took another sip of my drink. “I’m going back tomorrow.”

  “Oh, two days in a library—that sounds like a thrill.”

  “Well, we can’t all spend the afternoon lunching with Japanese bankers.”

  “Touché.”

  The magus laid a hand—the hand—comfortingly on David’s shoulder. It was searingly hot. David jumped away from the touch.

  “What did you do?” he asked, his voice breaking.

  The magus withdrew his hand. “I did what I am here to do. I protected you.”

  “But …” David closed his eyes. It was all too much, the bear, the magus. “That was magic.”

  “I do have some skills in that regard.”

  David couldn’t take his eyes off the old man. He could hear the terrified bear in the distance, stumbling away through the undergrowth.

  The magus sighed. “It is something that the brethren are trained in. Ways of magnifying our natural strengths. Focusing our minds. When we go on our journey, before being accepted fully into the Order, we are alone with our wits and our … strengths, to keep ourselves safe.”

  David thought of the kung fu movies he had watched on TV on Saturday afternoons, of the ability of those monks and peasants to break boards and bricks with their hands.

  “That’s more than training,” David said.

  The necklace, Matt said. David had noticed it too, a glint within the folds of the old man’s robes.

  “You did something with your necklace. You were holding it in your hand.”

  The magus smiled a half-smile. “You’re very observant,” he said. “You might have been accepted readily into the Brotherhood.”

  The magus reached into his robes and withdrew the silver amulet. It looked similar to the Sunstone, except the stone was not red but blue, a deep, rich blue that seemed to absorb even the scant light around it.

  The silver mount for the stone was also different: rather than the sun image that Dafyd had seen his whole life, the magus’s stone was mounted on a quarter-moon, with bright sparks of stars behind it.

  “How does it work?” David asked, still studying the necklace.

  “We can discuss it as we walk,” the magus said. “The darkness is coming on quickly, and it would be wise to be back at the camp before Captain Bream notices we’re both missing.”

  V

  WHEN I RANG THE BUZZER at the library the next morning, the door unlocked without even a sound through the intercom. Ernest was sitting behind his desk in a different suit, but one just as sleek and stylish as what he’d worn the day before.

  I, on the other hand, felt like I had been hit by a bus, and probably looked the same.

  In spite of our early start, Marci and I had closed out the Hyatt bar. After a couple of hours, we had moved from our bar stools to a table and ordered some food. And wine. And more wine.

  In retrospect, the second bottle of wine had probably been a mistake. Let alone the third.

  “Good morning, sir,” Ernest said, stepping out from behind the desk. “And how are you this morning?”

  I shook my head gingerly. “The less said about that the better.”

  He nodded and started down the corridor. “I’ve kept the room locked since you left yesterday, so it’s as you left it.”

  “Thank you,” I said, setting my coffee cup on a small table in the vestibule as I took off my jacket and hung it up with my bag. I picked up the coffee cup again and saw Ernest looking at it.

  “Oh, right.” I swallowed the cool dregs as quickly as I could, then looked for a garbage can.

  “I can take that for you, sir,” he said.

  “Thanks.” Not the most auspicious of starts.

  “My pleasure, sir.” It sounded like he almost meant it.

  “Chris.”

  “Of course. Chris.”

  I nodded as he opened the study door.

  “If you don’t mind my asking, Chris, about that book you have? I noticed it yesterday.”

  After a moment’s hesitation, I passed him the novel. “It’s a children’s book. By Lazarus Took. His last book, I think. I haven’t been able to find out too much about it.”

  He turned the book over in his hands, examining it carefully. “To the Four Directions,” he read slowly. “I’m not familiar with this one.”

  “That’s part of what brought me here.”

  “It’s really quite lovely,” he said, holding the book up to the light. “The symbols on the cover—is this a magical book?”

  I started to say yes reflexively, thinking of David, but then I realized what he was asking. “No, it’s just a novel.”

  “Ah,” he said, looking at it even more closely.

  “Do you recognize the symbols?” I asked, clutching at the faintest of hopes.

  “I’m not sure,” he said thoughtfully. “Are they important?”

  I shook my head. “No, I was just curious.”

  “This really is quite lovely. I don’t suppose—” He looked at me. “This would make a splendid addition to the library,” he said. His expression, the sheer covetousness that came over his face, left me feeling uneasy. It was the same look that Tony Markus had had in the restaurant. “Once you’re finished with it, of course. I’m sure that the trustees would make a very good offer. If you were inclined to part with it.”

  The thought of the book being in this library, open to study by anyone with even a passing interest in its powers, filled me with horror. I had seen what Lazarus Took had done with this spell—the thought of someone else getting their hands on it was too much to bear.

  “I’ll certainly consider it,” I said placatingly. “But it actually belongs to my son, and I don’t think he’d part with it.” Hoping that enough of a sense of “if it were up to me” came across to soothe any ruffled feathers.

  “Of course, sir,” Ernest said, nodding. “But if I might give you a card … In case anything changes.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Thanks.” I was unaccountably relieved when he handed the book back to me.

  Turning again to the boxes and the desk, I deflated. How could I expect to get through nine more boxes in the hours left to me? Especially not knowing what I was looking for.

  Especially feeling as crappy as I did.

  The key, I figured, was to not allow myself to get distracted. No matter how fascinating the papers, I needed to focus on finding the lexicon.

  Rather than continuing to work backwards, I started with the earliest box, marked “Juvenalia.” There wasn’t much there beyond some old stories, some letters, most of them between him and Cora, some clippings of newspaper columns that he had written as a young man, and a battered note
book in which he had written his thoughts on books he had read.

  “Everybody’s a critic,” I muttered, dropping the book back into the box and pushing the lid down.

  One down. I glanced at my watch—less than fifteen minutes.

  The next few boxes were much the same. As documented in a succession of notebooks, Took’s reading became decidedly more esoteric, with responses to Yeats’s magical writings, to Madame Blavartsky and the Spiritualists. There was an exchange of letters between Took and William Thorne, regarding the young man’s admission to the Order of the Golden Sunset. A yellow slip of paper with the library’s letterhead gave notice that the first letter of that exchange—from Thorne—had been removed from the archive and was on display in the gallery upstairs.

  By noon I was pleased with the progress I had made: four boxes in a little more than two hours.

  I was also starting to sweat out the booze, and the room was growing warmer. I needed a break. A walk outside. A cigarette. A coffee.

  On my return I attacked the boxes with a renewed vigour. I wished I could take more time—there was a wealth of fascinating material, from a journal documenting Took’s involvement with Thorne to the letters chronicling the schism that had led to the formation of the Brotherhood of the Stone. Took’s growing interest in magic was captured in a series of notebooks, all of them so densely written the pages were nearly black. But nothing that resembled a guide to ritual. Nothing that looked like a lexicon.

  I put the books back into the box. Less than three hours left.

  A knock at the door, and a key in the lock.

  “Chris,” Ernest said, and I was surprised by the sound of my first name in his voice. “I know that you’re quite busy, and that your time is limited, but I thought this might be of interest.”

  He was carrying a brown leather book, which he passed to me.

  It was smaller than a paperback, the leather soft and flexible. There was no writing on the spine, nothing on the front cover save a single symbol: the magical eight-pointed star that appeared on the cover of To the Four Directions, nestled within the outline of the sun, rendered in a Renaissance style.

  “What is this?” I asked, flipping through the pages. The book was full of drawings—symbols and sketches—and handwritten text, mostly English, but with words and phrases thrown in, in Latin and other languages I didn’t recognize.

  I tried to hold my hands steady.

  “It’s called The Language of Sighs,” Ernest said. “It’s the … handbook, I suppose, of the Brotherhood of the Stone, the group that Lazarus Took formed after leaving the Golden Sunset. That,” he said, gesturing at the cover, “is their symbol.”

  “Where did you get it?” I asked, turning to the title page. “The Language of Sighs” was written in a florid copperplate hand, with the line “as annotated by the Exulted Master of the Stone” below in smaller, slightly less ornate writing. A hand-drawn rendition of the crest from the front cover occupied the bottom third of the page. Everything on the title page—I flipped through the book again—no, everything in the book was written in a deep brown ink, all by hand.

  “It was in one of the displays upstairs,” Ernest said carefully. “Documenting the splintering of the Golden Dawn and tracing some of the later groups and movements that grew out of it. That”—he pointed at the “as annotated by” line—“is the name that’s on all of the material from the Brotherhood of the Stone. It’s probably what Lazarus Took called himself during his rituals.

  “It’s all handwritten,” I said, turning to the first page of text.

  “Most of the handbooks were,” Ernest said. “Especially for the smaller orders. The Brotherhood and groups like it were very private.

  Very insular. They weren’t looking for new members, so there was no need to publish their ‘sacred learning’ the way Crowley did with The Book of the Law. This would have been strictly for their personal use.”

  Like creating spells to trap little boys.

  I flipped farther into the book: every page was full, right to the end. The careful, precise script never faltered, never gave way to even a hint of sloppiness or fatigue. It made me think of hand-lettered bibles from the Middle Ages, every page a small work of art.

  “I know it’s probably not much use to you or what you’re working on, but I thought you might like to see it. Given the symbols used on the cover of that novel especially.” He looked at the book, sitting so innocently on the desk.

  I tried to contain my excitement. “No, it’s great. Thank you. It’ll make for good background material.”

  “Then I’ll leave it here with you,” he said, turning back toward the door.

  I sat down at the desk and laid the book carefully in front of me. My hands were shaking so badly I had to take a few deep breaths before I took my cell phone out of my pocket. Opening the book to the first page of writing, I held it wide with two fingers as I steadied my phone above it. I focused the image on the screen to take in a single page, then carefully pressed down on the shutter button. Shifting to the next page, I repeated the process, and quickly e-mailed both images.

  Then I called Sarah and Nora.

  “Did you find it?” Sarah asked excitedly.

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “That’s what I need you to tell me. Check the pictures that I just e-mailed, let me know if I’m on the right track.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Do you want to stay on the line?”

  I glanced at the door, knowing that it could open at any time. I didn’t want Ernest to catch me with my phone. He hadn’t asked for it, but if he knew I was taking photographs …

  “No, call me back.”

  She hung up without saying goodbye. I set the phone to vibrate and tucked it into my pocket.

  The waiting was agony. I tried to read some of The Language of Sighs, but I was lost after only a few words. I danced my fingers on the desk. This had to be it. It had to be.

  I picked up the phone as soon as it started to buzz.

  “Is this it?” I asked. “Is it the lexicon?” I bit my lip.

  “It looks like it,” Sarah said. “We’ll be able to work with it.”

  The relief washed over me like a wave.

  “It’s a bit grainy when I blow it up. But I can read it.”

  It took almost an hour to photograph and e-mail the handbook. I started with the front cover, not wanting to take anything for granted, then shot every page, studying each image in the screen of my phone before sending it to her.

  I cc’d each image to my own e-mail, as a backup. Better safe than sorry.

  A couple of minutes after sending the picture of the back cover, I called Sarah.

  “How do those look?” I asked.

  “Good,” she said. “Now we just need the book. When do you fly in?”

  “Tomorrow. In the afternoon.”

  “We’ll see you tomorrow, then.”

  My first impulse was to grab my stuff and get out of the library as quickly as I could. I had the information I needed. But instead, I went back to one of the boxes from the day before and pulled out the scrapbook, going through the articles one last time. I didn’t think that I had missed anything, but in light of Nora’s theory I read the articles about Pilbream and “the accident” with a more cynical eye.

  I couldn’t get over the sheer maliciousness, the scale of Took’s planning, the amount of thought that had gone into building Took’s trap. Pilbream’s accident had occurred in 1946—that meant that Took had been working on the spell before that, for who knows how long. And the book wasn’t published until 1951—after he had died.

  Was this whole thing Took’s revenge on the world that had driven him from his home, from his country, a lingering curse that would ensure his power lived on so long as his book continued to be read?

  And wasn’t that what every writer wanted? Immortality?

  “There are three kinds of stones,” the magus explained as they walked the quiet trail back to the camp. “The vast majori
ty of stones have absolutely no magical properties whatsoever. Almost every stone one sees in one’s lifetime is in this first group—it’s virtually impossible for someone not trained, or naturally gifted, to simply happen upon a magical stone. It occurs so rarely that when it does, it is the stuff of legend.”

  David nodded, thinking about all the beaches he had walked, all the stones that he had skipped.

  “Of the magical stones, some are inherently magical. They have their own powers, their own strengths, which they confer upon their possessor. There are defensive stones, which protect their wearers, and healing stones, which can care for the fallen. These stones are powerful in and of themselves: it requires no special skill to wield them.”

  They had slowed in their walk back to the camp, giving the magus time to speak.

  “The other type of stone, like the one I wear, has no inherent power of its own, but it can be used to focus and to magnify the strengths of the one who holds it. Its powers are therefore twice-limited, by the holder’s abilities, and by the natural properties of the stone itself, its physical form, its purity.”

  “So without the stone, you don’t have any powers?” David asked.

  “My strengths”—the magus was taking great care with his words—“would be substantially reduced, which is why I keep it close.”

  “Does the captain know about your powers?”

  “I would wager that the captain has heard the stories of the Brotherhood. Every child does. But I suspect that he believes those stories to be just that—stories. Legends. Nursery tales.” The magus smiled. “To him, I am little more than an old man, too comfortable with his books to have much impact on the world.”

  David was surprised to hear the magus add, “And that is not a bad thing.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Be careful, David.

  The magus took a deep breath. “The captain is a man of action, a soldier, utterly loyal, utterly reliable. He answers not to his heart, nor to his conscience, but only to the Queen. It is best that he think that any abilities of the Brotherhood are strictly the stuff of legend.”

  It took David a moment to work the magus’s words around in his mind. “You’re talking about the attack on the Berok camp. If Captain Bream had known of your powers, he would have ordered you—”