The square was eerily still as she reached the street. A solitary cab was taking a wide turn in front of the Harvard Coop and a fortress of unsold newspapers stood sentinel around the Out of Town kiosk. As the sky began to spit something between rain and snow, Lauren hurried to RavenWing.
When she got there, the sign in the window read CLOSED. But when she pushed the latch, the door opened, setting off tinkling wind chimes and the canary’s song.
“Lauren?” Deborah’s disembodied voice called from somewhere deep in the store. “Could you bolt the door behind you, please?” she asked before Lauren could identify herself. When Lauren came back through the small vestibule, Deborah was standing next to the trestle table smiling at her.
Deborah held out her hands and pressed Lauren’s free hand between them. “You’re frozen,” she said. “Come, I’ve put on some tea.” She waved Lauren toward the book corner. “Go sit down in the niche—it’s so much nicer than in the storage room. I’ll be right back.”
Lauren looked nervously around the empty store, remembering everything Gabe had told her the previous evening. Things that, despite Deborah’s “normal” appearance this morning, Lauren was sure were true. Thinking about Jackie’s admonition to keep an open mind, Lauren placed the shopping bag on the floor and took off her jacket. She sank into one of the beanbag chairs and shifted around, trying to get comfortable. But long-legged people and beanbag chairs don’t mix. With her knees in the air and her shoulders angled back toward the wall, Lauren felt like an overgrown Alice in a very uncomfortable wonderland.
“Milk or lemon?” Deborah called out through the door to the back room.
“Plain’s just fine.” Lauren didn’t care how her tea was accessorized. No matter what was in it, it was one of her least favorite beverages. Just as, she thought wryly, psychotics were one of her least favorite sources of information.
But when Deborah entered the niche, smiling as she balanced two steaming mugs and the bird cage, Lauren found herself smiling back. Deborah seemed so ordinary in her blue jeans and sweatshirt, so likable with her toothy grin and unruly hair. Doctors had been wrong before.
“I hope you don’t mind?” Deborah asked, motioning to the cage. “Summerland gets lonely. He’s much happier if he’s around people.” The little canary began to sing a melody that clearly indicated his happiness at being near them. “Aren’t you, darlin’?” Deborah cooed to her pet. “Aren’t you?”
“He’s beautiful,” Lauren told Deborah, just to be polite. But as she looked at the canary more closely, she saw that he was indeed an exceptionally handsome bird. He appeared to be smiling.
“I’m so glad you’ve come,” Deborah said as she settled the bird cage on the floor and herself into the other beanbag chair. “I feel badly about what happened in Moorscott.” She took a sip of tea and put the mug down on the table between their chairs. “If there’s anything we can do to make it up to you, just say the word.”
“Let me read the chronicle?”
Deborah threw back her head and laughed. “How about we start a little more slowly?” She pointed to the bag at Lauren’s feet. “What’s in there?”
Lauren leaned awkwardly to her right and pushed the bag over to Deborah. “I found it at Jackie’s—and I want you to tell me it doesn’t mean anything.”
“Let’s see if I can oblige.” Deborah pulled the shopping bag onto her lap and looked inside. She drew the urn out slowly and placed it on the floor, running her hands over the bearded face and the strange symbols below him. She put it to her ear and shook gently. Throwing an inscrutable look at Lauren, she popped the wide cork and carefully poured the contents onto the floor. The dead animal odor seemed an almost visible cloud, pushing itself into the spice ladened air. Summerland stopped singing and stood completely still on his swing. When Deborah saw the felt heart, she caught her breath.
Lauren grabbed her mug and took a large gulp of tea. The hot liquid burned her tongue. She put the mug back on the table. “I was thinking maybe it was some kind of mass-produced novelty item,” Lauren said to break the tense silence. “You know, one of those things you can have made up as a birthday gag or something?”
Deborah, examining the braid of hair, didn’t appear to hear her. “Do you keep a dream diary?” she asked.
“As a matter of fact I do,” Lauren said, startled by Deborah’s question. “How did you know?”
“Did you ever wake to find a dream recorded in an unfamiliar hand?”
“Of course not,” Lauren said.
Deborah gingerly turned the braid to avoid sticking herself with the nails. “Do you think this could have been Jackie’s hair?” she asked.
“It seems to be the right color,” Lauren said slowly. “But how could anyone have gotten enough of Jackie’s hair to make a braid?”
“Practitioners of black magic are very patient and resourceful people.” There was respect in Deborah’s voice as she picked up the pin-studded heart.
“So you think this comes from an actual sorcerer?” Lauren asked. “That it’s a real tool of voodoo?”
Just as Lauren began to squirm under the gaze of Deborah’s strange but hauntingly beautiful eyes, Deborah waved her hand in the air and said, “It’s as real as these books and these walls. As real as you and me.”
Lauren took a deep breath and told Deborah about the poppets. “Do you think they came from someone who actually wanted to hurt me and Jackie?”
“I hardly think they came from a friend.” Deborah scooped the fingernail parings into her hand and dropped them into the urn. As soon as the urn was corked, Summerland resumed his song. Deborah wiped her hands on her skirt and turned back to Lauren. “There’s so much out there that so many of you don’t allow yourselves to see. The belief that you can know and understand everything—that you can figure out the rules and then apply them—keeps you from knowing and understanding. There are hidden relationships between all elements of the cosmos.”
Annoyed by Deborah’s condescending tone, Lauren demanded, “Hidden relationships like yours and Gabe Phipps?”
“Ah,” Deborah said. “I wondered when the great Dr. Ego would force himself into our conversation. Never underestimate the power of a man with limitless ambition.”
“It was me who forced him into the conversation,” Lauren said. “He’s not even here.”
“I suppose he told you I spent time at McLean? That I suffer from paranoid delusions? That I’m psychotic and unstable and dangerous to both myself and others?” Although Deborah’s words were harsh, her voice was amused.
“Is it true?”
“Mark my words,” Deborah said, all signs of amusement gone. “Gabe Phipps is far more dangerous than I’ll ever be. Don’t be fooled by his power and charisma—the man is evil. Evil surrounding a hollow core of ego.”
“Aren’t you exaggerating just a bit?”
“Truth can never be exaggerated.” Deborah’s pale eyes scoured Lauren’s. “Have you ever gone scuba diving?”
Lauren blinked, taken aback by Deborah’s rapid change of subject.
“Bear with this psychotic for a moment, if you will,” Deborah said. “We nut cases often make more sense than people like to admit.”
Lauren regarded Deborah warily. “I don’t swim.”
“You’re afraid of water.” Deborah spoke with a knowledge that Lauren found unnerving.
Lauren pushed herself up in the chair. “What does my swimming ability have to do with Gabe Phipps or Bellarmine urns?”
“When you scuba dive, you’re a visitor in another universe,” Deborah said. “The aquatic world coexists with our own, but most of us live our lives virtually unaware of its existence. And the physical laws that govern there are completely different from those of the land. Air, which is life to us, is death to most sea creatures. Water, which defines their existence, is just a part of the planet on which we can’t live.” She placed the braid on one palm and the felt heart on the other. She held them out to Lauren. “What makes
sense in one place, makes none in the other.”
Lauren silently studied Jackie’s name sewn across the felt heart, awed by Deborah’s power to logically explaining the illogical. She remembered Jackie’s words: “Maybe Deborah just sees what the rest of us are too blind to see.”
“Oh, I’m far from crazy,” Deborah said. “In some ways I’m all too sane—for I can see what their rigid belief system doesn’t allow human beings to see: that magic and reincarnation are real.”
Taken aback by the similarity between Deborah’s words and her own thoughts, Lauren blurted, “The doctors at McLean couldn’t see what you did either?”
“Doctors aren’t trying to see anything,” Deborah said. “They’re too consumed with validating themselves and their theories to try to understand anything else.”
“Are you saying you think magic was involved in Jackie’s death?”
“It’s a possibility,” Deborah said as she put the urn back into the bag and placed it at Lauren’s feet. “These things often don’t work out as the practitioner plans. And they’re rarely simple.” She handed Lauren her mug of tea as if she had asked for it. “Were you a precocious child?”
Stalling for time, Lauren took a long sip of the now lukewarm tea. It was clear that the doctors at McLean had not been as blind as Deborah believed. Deborah’s view of reality was definitely warped.
Sighing, Lauren decided that if she was going to get the information Nat wanted, she would have to play along. “I’m an only child,” she said. “According to my parents, there was no one more precocious.”
Deborah seemed pleased with this answer. “I usually have many siblings. But I’ve never had any children.”
For a moment Lauren was confused by Deborah’s choice of words. Then she understood. “You mean in every lifetime it’s the same?”
“Although it’s not always true for every soul in every lifetime, it’s not uncommon.” Deborah rested her hands in her lap and looked at Lauren closely. “For example, in each incarnation, Faith Osborne’s been an only child who gives birth to only one of her own.”
Lauren nodded. “Her daughter Dorcas was hung in 1692.”
“Seven years old and proclaimed a witch,” Deborah said, shaking her head. “The poor child thought it was all a game. She didn’t know any better than to admit to bewitching Elizabeth Cloyce’s cow and spoiling the milk. And her own stepfather, Oliver Osborn, didn’t know any better than to believe her.”
The nightmare face of Oliver Osborne rose before Lauren, bloated and full of black teeth; the stench of his putrid breath filled her nostrils, his angry voice filled her head. The room grew unbearably warm and seemed to swirl around her. She pulled at the turtle-neck of her shirt and gasped for air.
“Lauren?” Deborah called, her voice sounding as if it were coming from the end of a long tunnel. “Are you all right?”
Lauren blinked and the face disappeared along with his foul smell. She took a deep breath of the spicy air and noticed that Deborah was staring at her neck.
“I’m fine,” she said, tugging at her collar again. “I guess I was up too late last night.” Lauren felt a flush rise on her cheeks, for she had the unsettling sensation that Deborah knew exactly why—and with whom—she had been up too late. She busied herself digging into her backpack for a notebook and pen, hoping these props would put this meeting back on a professional plane. After she found her place in her notes, she leaned forward, her long body awkward in the low chair. “Can I be frank with you?”
“Please.”
“In order to make my book work, I need a better understanding of reincarnation,” Lauren said. “It’s all so amorphous, so hard to grasp. Like trying to hold fog in your hand.”
“Most people feel that way about spiritual ideas. The truth is, reincarnation’s no harder—or easier—to grasp than heaven or God or Jesus Christ.” Deborah watched Lauren closely over the rim of her mug. “How can I help you get your mind around this?”
“Tell me about you,” Lauren said. “How did you know you were Rebeka Hibbens—and when?” She tapped her pen on her notebook, wondering if this was really a good line of questioning but curious despite herself. “And what about Cassandra? Was it the same for her? The same for everyone in the coven?”
“Fair enough,” Deborah said, putting her mug on the table. “Did you ever hear of a man named Ian Stevenson? He’s a physician, a serious scientist—and he’s studied thousands of cases of reported reincarnation.”
“The children who remember previous lives book,” Lauren said excitedly. “I read it a couple of weeks ago as part of my research for Rebeka Hibbens.” She had skimmed Ian Stevenson’s book on the day Jackie died and hadn’t been able to get herself to read it since. Whenever she saw the black and red cover, it brought back that awful afternoon with such vividness that she was forced to turn away.
“Then you know he’s found lots of cases of young children who, when they first begin to talk, tell stories about lives they’ve lived in other places and times. Sometimes they even speak foreign languages.”
“But didn’t he have trouble confirming most of the stories?”
Deborah nodded. “But he also found many cases he was able to confirm. Children who remembered families in faraway places who, when Stevenson took them there, named all these ‘unknown’ people and even commented on changes that had occurred in the surroundings since their own ‘death.’”
“And that’s what it was like for you?”
“Except much more vivid—and my memories have never faded, as did most of the subjects’ in Stevenson’s research. I remember all my lives the way you remember your childhood.”
Lauren pondered this information, but she wrote nothing in her notebook. “And it’s the same for everyone in the coven?”
“All the real witches.”
“Did you tell your parents?”
“I was born into a family of fundamentalist Christians in rural Texas. I had six brothers who were as rowdy and as conservative as they come—sometimes the sages have quite a sense of humor. On the other hand, Cassandra was born to a mother who was a clairvoyant, so she was out of the ‘broom closet’ at a very early age.”
Deborah must have seen from the expression on Lauren’s face that she was losing her, so she switched to a more serious note. “When I was about three, I explained to my mother that I had been lots of people who had lived in other places—I told her some stories about Rebeka and then I did a few pagan chants for her.” Deborah paused and began to laugh. “I spent a week in the cow shed for my ‘blasphemy.’ After that, I kept my knowledge to myself. I knew all along that I’d come to Cambridge and meet up with the rest of the coven, that my childhood was just a place to practice my craft and to hone my skills.”
Lauren wondered where Gabe and Deborah’s marriage fit into this fantasy, but she asked, “What do you mean by ‘your craft’?”
“Magic,” Deborah said simply. “It’s as I told you that first afternoon. The Immortalis allows us to keep our magical skills at the same level they were at the end of our previous life. Those who don’t participate in the Immortalis have to relearn most of what they knew in each lifetime. Although,” she added, “re-learning comes much more easily than learning something for the first time.”
“Are you saying there are others?” Lauren asked. “Other people who know they’re reincarnated?”
“On some level, everyone knows. Haven’t you ever had flashes of another time and place?” Deborah asked, leaning forward and watching Lauren closely. “Images of a person you know you aren’t but still feel that you are? Dreams that seem too real and detailed to be just figments of your subconscious imagination?”
Lauren lowered her eyes so Deborah wouldn’t see that she had indeed had such experiences. She shrugged nonchalantly. “Sometimes,” she admitted. “But I figure it’s one of the occupational hazards of being a graduate student in history. You know, like medical students who get every disease they study.”
“You dream that you live in the seventeenth century?”
Lauren hesitated. “It’s the time I’m most familiar with—the period that’s gotten under my skin and into my subconscious.”
“Could you tell me one of your dreams?”
“I’d really rather not.” Lauren felt a flush of annoyance rising on her cheeks. “Dreams are pretty personal.”
“Please?” Deborah pressed. “I don’t mean to pry, but dreams fascinate me—and they must fascinate you too if you keep a journal.”
Don’t mean to pry, Lauren thought. That was a laugh. But she also realized that if she expected Deborah to give her information, she had to be forthcoming in return. “Last week I dreamed I was being chased through the library by Oliver Osborne. And just last night, I had a dream in which I was chained in a Colonial prison—although after Moorscott, I guess it’s not too hard to imagine where that one came from.”
Deborah’s eyes flashed for a moment with what Lauren thought might be fear, but she didn’t say anything.
Lauren shifted uncomfortably in the beanbag chair and glanced down at her watch. “Look, I’ve less than an hour before I have to pick up my son and—”
“Your editor wants the chronicle,” Deborah interrupted, “which of course we can’t give you. But I can tell you more about our fables. About Rebeka’s lancet and magic and the details of how we reenact our Immortalis every one hundred and one years. It might take a few sessions, but we can meet here for the next few Sunday mornings, if you’d like. What do you say?”
“Great.” Lauren poised her pen over her notebook and flashed a peppy smile. But as she prepared to listen to Deborah with an open mind, all she could hear were Gabe’s words: “Dr. Bluestone told me she was a very sick woman.… Preoccupied with suicide and delusions of grandeur … A threat to herself and others …”
See No Evil Page 19