by John Farris
She lured Barry's attention from this finery by dropping into her hand a small amulet bag that was inordinately heavy; a gift from the Dalai Lama, it was made of pure gold mesh.
"Woven of precisely one hundred and eight strands of gold—a sacred number. I believe I have a photograph, taken in twenty-one or twenty-two. Yes, here it is--my audience with the Dalai Lama, who encouraged me to seriously pursue my ambition to study Lamaism. His astrologers so advised him of my worthiness. You will notice he has placed a khata—a silk scarf—around my neck and has shown to me the palms of his hands, a most singular honor. Tibetans believe that all of one's life may be viewed in the palm, if one has sufficient knowledge to read what is engraved there. To show one's palms is an act of openness, of intimate friendship."
Alexandra produced more photos—of celebrations, processions, dignitaries, beggars. Landscapes of a sun-struck, threatening beauty.
"Tibet is one of the harshest lands on earth," Alexandra said. "Only the physically strong and the strong-minded are allowed to survive. They must learn to endure the altitude and the extremes of temperature: great heat at noon in the summers, zero cold by moonrise. Perhaps because of the immutable natural laws, women have always enjoyed equality with men, an equality still beyond the grasp of Western women. Tibetan women, often alone or in small groups, are frequent travelers in the loneliest reaches of the country, such as the northern Changtang. I have seen nuns living as hermits in caves in forbidding wilds."
A cat jumped to the top of a gong frame and scolded her for some obscure slight. Alexandra took him down and scolded him back. Barry said, "How long has it been since you were in Tibet?"
"Perhaps twenty-four hours," Alexandra said, and Barry had to look at her twice to see that she was being mischievous.
"How do you mean?"
"Physically I left my adopted land more than twenty years ago, when the Communist Chinese invaded. But Tibet is still perfectly realized in my mind. By visualization, for which I have had fully half a century of training, I can by stepping outside this cottage door find myself in Lhasa—in the warrens of the Potala, the shops and stalls by the cathedral of JoKang. Perhaps I shall decide to meditate for a day among the rhododendrons and dwarf apple trees of Norbu Linga." She looked at Barry over the cunningly shaped head of the cat she was holding. "I think, with a little more effort, I could persuade you to see what I see, share in my experience." Her eyes were startling in the wine-colored light of the fading day, so that the eyes of the Siamese, doubled below hers, of equal intensity but nebulous color more ashen than blue, seemed reflections swimming on a level of the air.
"You have a fantastic imagination."
"So do we all. Our gods, our evil spirits, the cosmos itself are merely visions that exist in the mind, are created by and erased by mind."
"You said something like that before."
"It is the truth of Lamaism from which all truths spring. Each of us has the power to alter experience, to evoke magic. The evocation most often is the result of arduous training and discipline, though there are instances of spontaneous transformation by the naive but exceptionally gifted. It is all a matter of energy rightly directed—our word is angkur. Self-empowerment. The most adept at the generation of palpable phantoms and worlds for them to inhabit are near to godlike—bodhisattva, supremely spiritual beings. Tibetans are fond of the legend of King Gesar of Ling, who created of himself a multitude, supplied with horses, tents, servants. To do battle he imagined phantom soldiers, which dispatched his enemies with no less deadly effect than if they had been real."
"That's just a story."
"Congenial to the nature of a people who have persevered in a wonderland that no single god could conceive, a land of mirage and storm and the silences of the eternal. Aside from legends, I have had many experiences with phantoms, or tulpas, as we call them—the creatures of master magicians. I once made one myself."
"How?"
"By concentration of thought and the repetition of certain prescribed rituals I was able, after a period of some months in seclusion, to visualize a phantom monk. A pleasant and rotund little man who became, after much effort on my part, quite realistic and active around my apartment. My friends became very fond of him."
"They saw him too? Well, I guess that's not unusual. We have a ghost at home."
"Ah, yes."
"Enoch. He's been hanging around the farmhouse since the Revolutionary War. The problem is he doesn't believe he's dead."
Alexandra nodded. "The manor house is rather well populated with similar unfortunate souls. But they do no harm."
"Neither does Enoch. My father's seen him. So has my brother. Mrs. Aldrich refuses to see him. Just as well. I don't know how we'd get along without her." Barry laughed and checked the time. "Speaking of Mrs. Aldrich—she's waiting for the lamb chops. I'd better go."
Barry arranged to pick up Alexandra on Saturday evening. She felt, in parting, more at ease with the elderly woman. Alexandra was undeniably eccentric, but it was hard to dismiss her as a humbug, and she certainly was lively company. She knew that her father, who had been raised by a septuagenarian aunt of sly wit and fierce independence, would take to Alexandra and her yarns in a big way.
She drove home in a little more than four minutes, paused to pick up the mail. With the remote control unit she closed the gates of Tuatha de Dannan behind her, glanced at an oversized postcard from Greece filled with Dal's microscopic lettering, and continued up the curving leafy road toward the house.
Halfway there, as she was crossing a log-and-plank bridge in a glade of wild rhododendron and white birch trees, she saw Alexandra again, moving a little way off through the woods with the lowering sun behind her.
Barry hit the brake so hard she almost slid over into the rock wall beside the unpaved road.
Alexandra was perhaps thirty yards away, and she was walking roughly parallel to the road in the direction of the house. At least, Barry assumed it was Alexandra she saw, but her practical mind denied the possibility. She had driven away from Kinbote estate with Alexandra standing in the doorway of her cottage, holding an armload of cat, smiling good-bye. There was no way she could have walked from the cottage to this patch of Brennan woods in so short a time. Barry had driven the country road at nearly fifty miles an hour, covering a distance of about two and a half miles. To make the matter more perplexing, Alexandra, or whoever it was, now was completely dressed in the costume that Barry had admired, piece by piece, as it emerged from Alexandra's trunk: the voluptuous, strangely erotic leather face mask, the smashing heliotropic blouse and red bolero vest, a full calf length black skirt, and immaculate white boots. She was carrying, under one arm, a leather casket with lockwork and hinges of flashing gold; the casket was about the size of a loaf of bread.
Barry got out of the Volvo fast, adrenaline surging.
"Alexandra!
The woman, as if surprised to hear her name called, turned full face with the rictus of a helmed Smile glancing into sunlight. Despite the distance between them, Barry thought she could make out the movement of eyes behind the diagonal slits cut for them in the leather.
She scrambled through the bog near the bridge and uphill toward the torchy treeline where the figure of the woman had fallen two-thirds into shadow, with only the brilliance of one sleeve, the curve of a hand around the end of the casket showing full fleshed in the remaining light. Barry was breathless, aghast, but impelled toward her.
"But you—how could you—"
The eyes were Alexandra's: pungent as mint, appraising. They stopped Barry in her tracks. Alexandra spoke not a word but slowly extended the casket to Barry. It looked very old. There were markings on it in a language she had never seen.
Barry reached numbly for the casket. Her hand brushed Alexandra's.
She felt something that was not flesh and bone; her fingers sank into it. Recoiling, crying out in fright, she saw the figure of the woman go loose as smoke, which streamed through the low branches of the t
rees. The sharp colors, the fixed smile vanished in the gilded twilight.
From the fingers of Barry's hand ectoplasm writhed stickily. She knelt and thrust the hand into soft earth humus—scrubbed it frantically on a stone as she felt her gorge rise. She was afraid she would faint, only the more persuasive fear that she would awaken in full darkness in this haunted wood kept her sensible.
The ectoplasm dissolved as if it had never been. Her hand shook, the nails were rimmed in black, Barry's cheeks burned with humiliated tears.
Why? she thought. Why did you do this to me? She trudged back to the station wagon and locked herself inside, shivering. With the windows raised she was free to scream, but couldn't; her throat was too tight. She turned on the radio, to rock music. Rod Stewart's voice rasped against her soul like a scrub brush. After a few minutes she found the strength to drive the remaining few hundred yards to the house, all pleasure blasted from her day, bound helplessly in a rage that hurt like a vest of nails.
Chapter 24
Dal had left Tuatha de Dannan the last week in February to spend a few days in Paris and attend the wedding of an artist friend. In Paris other friends and acquaintances had lured him south to Marbella on the Costa Del Sol. Then, island hopping, Dal made his way across the Mediterranean aboard Freddy somebody or other's yacht to Greece, and Corfu, where the telephone service was a quaint antique, despite the latest in communications satellites crisscrossing the heavens.
It was nearly eleven thirty at night when Tom Brennan succeeded in getting a call through to his son. He lay slackly on his bed in robe and pajamas, his back propped against big pillows, the telephone beside him, finding it almost too much effort to hold the receiver to his ear. On the Betamax opposite the bed Casablanca played out its familiar intrigue, Bogie's harrowed handsomeness, Bergman's face in close-up soft as a cloud, verging on tears. Star-crossed love.
"Hello? Hello—Dal? It's Tom! Can you hear me?"
"Hi, Dad!"
The sound of his son's voice, filtered through a wall of metallic noise, brought a jet of tears; Tom trembled and lost his own voice momentarily.
"Dad, you there?"
"Yes, I'm—what time is it there?"
"Called me to find out time it is?"
"No, no. Haven't had a letter from you—in a month. I was wondering how you were."
"Kay. Getting little work done. They had earthquake here couple weeks go."
"Earthquake?"
"Wall fell on me."
"My God, Dal!"
"Masonry wall. I'm little skinned up and sore, that's all. Dad, you don't sound so good."
"No, I'm not—feeling well. I had the flu."
"Flu? That was two months ago! Is something else wrong?"
"I don't know. I feel weak. Just can't get out of bed anymore. And I'm afraid—"
There was silence on Dal's end. Tom listened to the susurrus of long distance, tuned into another voice sounding as far away as limbo, shouting in an exotic alien language.
"Afraid of what, Dad?"
Tom couldn't suppress a sob. He was trembling. His skin was coppery in the light from the hall, like spoiled fish, the freckles like bloodspots everywhere.
"Barry—she's so infatuated with him—nothing else matters—"
"Do you mean Mark?"
"Yes! He—he has me worried. He's—not like anybody I've ever known.
"Why that guy still hanging around? Don't you get rid of him?"
"I can't. He's—in my studio, all the time
"Doing there?"
"Painting. I wish—wish you'd come home, Dal. We need you."
The line went dead.
Tom looked up, stiffened from shock. Mark was in the middle of the bedroom, bending over, retrieving the loose phone cord. He had a tray with a glass of milk on it in his other hand. He had come in very quietly. Tom had no idea of how long he'd been there.
"Tom," Mark said, "I'm sorry. I didn't see the phone cord. I pulled it right out of the wall with my foot."
Tom, holding the useless receiver, began to sob again. Mark looked at him, perplexed.
"I said I was sorry. Who were you talking to, Dal?"
On the television screen actors dressed as French soldiers were singing the "Marseillaise" in Rick's place. Mark didn't bother to plug the phone in again. He sat down on the bed beside Tom, the tray on his knees. He reached out and took the receiver from Tom's hand. Then he held out the glass of milk.
"Barry wants you to drink this," he said.
Tom's robe was open, revealing all the bones of his sunken chest. He breathed through his mouth, a dry rustling noise. When he made no move to take the glass Mark held it to his lips and put his other hand behind Tom's head to steady him. Tom choked after two swallows and sprayed milk on them.
Mark put the glass on the night table and took Tom in his arms. It was a dispassionate embrace, expressing no tenderness or concern for the artist. Rather he seemed to be taking possession of what was left.
After a long time he relaxed his grip. Tom's eyes had closed. Mark spoke quietly to him, laying him back on the pillows.
"I have to go to work now. I'll work all night, every night, until I'm as good as you. And I will be. Soon."
Chapter 25
"How's Dad?" Barry asked when Mark walked into the studio.
He smiled at her. "Sleeping."
"Did he drink his milk?"
"Some of it. I left the glass by the bed in case he wants to finish it later." He went immediately to one of the easels and set to work. He had several things going at once in the studio, in tempera, in oil, in chalk; he was insatiable, learning his craft at a phenomenal pace. Barry watched him work on the landscape that he'd nearly finished, a familiar hill of the farm made exceptional by his placement of a cracked mason jar in the foreground, something her father might have thought of: jagged angles and greening sunlight in the jar, the buds of a willow a dangle down. In contrast the life study of her in oil was barely sketched out.
Barry retired to her corner, where there was a fake fur rug by the iron stove. She kicked off her moccasins, unbelted her jeans, took them down, folded them over the back of a chair. She pulled off the lightweight cotton sweater she'd been wearing, which left her in leopard-print underwear, a tank top, string bikini pants. She had the beginning of a tan, was already a little too red from incautious exposure along the tops of her thighs and across her face. She put a single gold earring in the left pierced lobe, walked barefoot across the floor to an empty space with a neutral background ten feet from the easel that had her outline on it. She took up a stance there, facing the vertical rack of lights that duplicated sunlight and bathed her evenly from head to toe, stood with arms folded below her breasts waiting for him to leave his landscape and resume with her. Neither of them spoke.
She waited five minutes, ten. Then he broke off suddenly and approached her, picked up tubes of color, squeezed them onto his palette.
"Why were you so upset at supper?" he asked, mixing colors, laying on strokes. "You didn't eat."
"Oh," she sighed, "it was just something that happened this afternoon."
"At the supermarket?"
"No, later. On the way home. I saw something I wish I hadn't."
"What was that?" Mark asked, glancing up from his brushwork. He painted with surety, energy, and a quickness that even her father couldn't duplicate.
"I was visiting Alexandra Chatellaine—do you remember her?"
He thought about it. "The old woman at the hospital?"
"Yes. She has a little cottage at Kinbote estate. I left and drove straight home. Just after I came through the gates I saw her again in our woods. But I swear, Mark, it couldn't have been more than five minutes! And it's at least two miles. I don't know how she—I've been thinking about it a lot. Alexandra's a mystic, and she lived in Tibet. I had some tea at her place that made me feel funny and she was burning incense. The whole experience must have got to me in some strange way."
"What did you see?"
"I saw a ghost in the woods that I thought was Alexandra. Now I know you don't believe in ghosts—"
Mark said practically, "Show me one and I'll believe."
"Enoch is very shy around you for some reason. Anyway, I thought it was Alexandra. I got out of the car and followed. When I touched her—it—nothing was there. I mean, what was there just drifted away like smoke, and I was left with some sticky cold stuff on my hand."
Mark stopped painting and shook his head slowly, disbelieving.
"Weird, huh?" Barry said with a game smile.
"Maybe you ought to stay away from her."
"Right. Except I already invited her to dinner Saturday. But I'll get out of that somehow."
They were silent for a while. Then Mark said, "On second thought, I think she ought to come over. I'd like to talk to her. She sounds interesting."
Barry shifted her position unobtrusively; a muscle had begun to ache. With her father it didn't matter how often she changed—he never transcribed a pose—but she didn't want to throw Mark off his mettle. At this point he seemed to be having a little difficulty in sizing her up.
After another quarter hour of painting, he put his brushes down and cleaned his hands. He came over to Barry and just stared her up and down, frowning, preoccupied. Then he went on one knee and placed his still faintly slicked fingertips sensitively on her feet and ankles, where he read, like a blind man, the skin-deep bones, arches, and hollows, the youthful sinew and sumptuously fatted calves. He slid both hands up her long right leg to the knee, probed there the complicated cap, tested the bulky articulation.
Barry had begun to flush, from thigh to groin to belly, she was as rosy as a sunrise from his explorations before he stood and stepped back.
"Will you take everything off?"
"Yes," she said faintly.
Her hands tingled as she pulled down the spotty triangles of bikini, flicked the bottom aside with a foot. Barry skimmed the top over her crackling head and dropped that too, then faced him, hands at her sides, feet well spaced. Mark went behind her, and Barry's blush deepened in anticipation of what he might do. Her skin crawled pleasurably. After too long a time she felt his touch again as he gently lifted, then separated her velvet cheeks at the base of the spine, spread them wide in order to trace the tremulous crescents of underflesh to the slightly steely texture of mons veneris; the half-hidden petals of her tender sex unfolded humidly as she posed.