The Last Guardian of Everness

by John C. Wright

  Galen nodded sternly, and his expression seemed to soften. “It is well you are contrite. I know you reject the deep traditions of our House, and have forgotten the oath of patience and faithfulness, which we, true watchmen at our posts, must obey. But the tradition of Everness sounds a call to which all of our blood return, soon or late. . .” Now Galen sank into a reverie; and for a moment, a look of guiltiness and remorse seemed to soften the stern expression of his features.

  For a moment they sat in the van together, not looking at each other, their expressions identical, their heads tilted forward at the same angles, the troubled looks in their eyes seeming the same.

  “I figure,” said Peter, “that I didn’t get mad when you spit up on me. So I shouldn’t get mad at things smaller than that. I’m trying to tell you that I realized that I still love my son. I still love you.”

  A haunted, guilty look grew in Galen’s eyes. His lips trembled, and he spoke. “I, too, have a confession. It is a terrible one. But not until I saw the face of one of my own family again did I realize the true depth of what I have done. I had not realized the true meaning of what it means to be a traitor to our house. But we face terrible foes, and there is none I can trust with my councils. Your son is not dead. I am not your son.”

  Peter stiffened. “Here I am trying to apologize and you go say a thing like that! Your Grampa said something just like that to my face once. You’re no son of mine, he said. But he didn’t call me a traitor! Traitor to what?! A bunch of stupid craziness and phoniness!”

  Galen’s tone was lofty, sharp, and cold: “Indeed? Perhaps I misunderstood the thrust of your apology.”

  “I not saying I’m sorry I left all that nuttiness behind me. I’m not saying it’s not nuttiness. I know you really believe that stuff.”

  “Indeed I do,” Galen said softly, a hint of a smile at his lips.

  “All I’m saying is that I’m sorry I got on you about it. See? That it’s okay by me if you want to live your life waiting for King Arthur to come back, staying up nights with your Gramps listening for sea-bells to warn you about the destruction of the world. Go ahead and wait.” Peter drew a deep breath, and visibly calmed himself. He continued in a low voice, “All I’m saying is that I can put up with it now. It won’t change how I feel about you.”

  Galen said sardonically, “So you do not trouble to serve the honor of our family, but you will no more curse your own son for obeying laws you cast aside? You will forgive him for his faithfulness and constancy? Thank you for your toleration!” He gave a bark of sarcastic laughter and fell silent.

  Such anger seized on Peter, then, that he grew red in the face, and he could feel his heartbeat throbbing in his cheeks and temples. But he controlled himself, and he spoke in a quiet voice: “I thought in the hospital that I might lose you. I don’t want to lose you. I want things to be right between us. You got to stick by your family.”

  Galen was silent, withdrawn. Then Galen laid his hand on Peter’s shoulder and gave it a squeeze. “You are right that loyalty to family is all we have, alone in a wilderness of enemies and false friends. We are of one blood, you and I, and that is a bond not to be broken. We may offend each other again. In days to come, you may hate me. But even if we must fight, let us hope that the love of father and son will survive the turmoil.” Peter patted the hand on his shoulder, a warmth in his heart.

  “Okay, son. But let’s not fight.”

  “Let us be in a holiday mood, you and I! We return to our ancestral seat. It is one place, I know, which would not have changed since I slept.”

  “Boy, your Grampa really messed up the way you talk. You got it from those books of his.”

  “How long till we arrive at Everness House?”

  “We’re not going there.”

  Galen seemed to relax, his expression quiet, his eyes glittering with a dangerous thoughtfulness. “No? And yet we grow ever closer to the House’s center of power.”

  “Well, son, I sort of thought you and I would stay at Emily’s house. It used to be mine. She’s never there; she lives at Wilbur’s now. They said I could stay there while I was visiting you. Like it was a big favor to let a man stay in his own house.” He snorted in contempt.

  Galen said in a careful voice. “Surely my Grand Pa wishes also to see me again. To reassure himself of my good health.”

  “We won’t be that far away,” said Peter. “Maybe you’ll see him.” He spoke in a tone of voice that made it clear Peter would do everything in his power to prevent that from happening.

  Galen laid his hand on the dashboard, as if feeling the powerful vibrations of the van in motion, as if listening to the muttered roar of the engine like the noises of an alien and incomprehensible beast, and he looked at the complex, swift motions by which Peter was guiding the huge vehicle. There was a solemn look in his eye, a strangeness, as if the lights and dials of the dashboard were illegible to him, a mystery beyond his powers.

  Galen sighed and sank back into his seat. “Ah, well. Perhaps you can teach me how to speak more like mine old self before I visit Grand Father.”

  But Peter was not listening. He was staring at the rearview mirror. “Someone’s following us. That car’s been with us for more than an hour.”

  8

  The Strange

  and

  Ancient House

  Unchanging

  I

  Raven sat in the passenger’s seat, watching the reflections of the streetlights on the car hood flow by, one after another. Wendy was telling him all about Galen Waylock’s adventures in a dream-city at the edge of the world. Raven could not follow the logic of the story, and did not try. He was tired (he had gotten up, as was his wont, at dawn, and he let the words roll over him like a warm and pleasant sea-wave one cannot swim against.

  Every now and again, he found himself nodding off, and in his half- dreams, inspired by Wendy’s words, strange images floated behind his eyes.

  He saw a line of warriors in conical helms and garbed in silver scale- mail, armed with spears of starlight, standing watch on the battlements of a vast, dark wall overlooking the turbulent sea. Far below these knights, in the bitter waves of the sea, were black seal-creatures with luminous eyes, silently floating below the waves, waiting, watching. Far down, below the seal-men, was an abyss; and, in the abyss, the outline of seven towers made of black diamond, crusted with barnacles, adrip with seaweed. And in the topmost tower was a light, bright as the morning star, rising from the deep.

  As Raven nodded, he saw again the knights stationed on the wall, but they were fewer now. There were a score of knights; a dozen; a few. Then there were only two; a young boy and an old man, alone upon the titanic wall, the last defenders left.

  And the tide was rising. With every wave, the creatures in the sea grew closer.

  Raven imagined what it would look like if the seal-men began to climb the slippery rock to the battlement, chortling to each other with throaty coughs and barks of laughter. Some of them were dressed in water-soaked rags of dead sailor’s clothing; some had masks made of flayed human skin, carefully cut from the faces of corpses, worn across their whiskered muzzles.

  When Wendy was describing the horrible huge hand that had come to seize Galen and drag him away, Raven, half-asleep, saw images of a giant figure, robed in wings of darkness, hooded, immense, striding hugely across the nighted world, stepping over trees and cottages, carrying in one hand a reaping hook of black iron and, in the other, a cage which held a flickering shimmer of fading light. Beneath the hood there was nothing, and from this nothing came, every now and then, a glint of feeble rays of light, like moonlight seen through smog. And where this gray and feeble light touched, trees withered, grass faded, and the small scurrying animals by the roadside fell and did not rise again.

  The hooded, giant figure stepped over the wall, dislodging stones, and waded the ocean, leaving a wake of floating fish where the shadow of its cloak fell. When it reached the edge of the world, it strode up the s
teps of a giant ziggurat which perched on the cliffside and made a gesture toward its feet.

  There was another figure, dressed in armor made of dead men’s bones, standing by the giant’s ankles, who called out across the darkness in a thin, cold voice: “Sulva, where fell sprites abide! Heave up your icy horns to me, your sterile plains, your lifeless sea, that I may journey to your hidden, farther side! I know the cause of your inconstancy, and why your light ebbs and fails; I know a planetary angel where sin prevails. Last to fall, lowest sphere of all, put shame aside; unhide yourself to me.”

  As Koschei said these words, the globe of the Moon rose up, huge, lifeless, like a skull in the sky, many times more enormous than Raven had ever seen it before; so close to the Earth that the giant, with a vast, slow sweep of its cloak-billowing arm, was able to throw the caged light it held onto the barren lunar surface.

  Immediately, a horde of obese, blind lepers, with tears of pus running down their flabby cheeks from empty eye sockets, waddled out from craters and pits to seize the cage, which they chained to a cart and began dragging across the mountains and craters to the moon’s far side. One of the blind, grotesquely fat men raised a scabby, heavy arm and pointed down at Raven, hooting with alarmed, choked noises.

  Koschei turned and looked at Raven. “There is a dreamer here, from Earth. I think he has heard every word of what we are saying.”

  Raven started awake. The car was speeding down a lonely stretch of highway, east, toward the full moon, just then rising between the trees bordering the road.

  Wendy spoke in an exasperated yet (somehow) cheerful voice: “Raven! Are you dreaming? You haven’t heard a word of what I’ve been saying!”

  II

  “No, no,” said Raven, rubbing his eyes. “I hear everything. You think Azrael in cage learn from seal-people how to change skins; that he also learn how to take soul out of body. He cannot get out of cage, but can slip soul out between bars; Galen takes to. . . what is called bony beach? Nastrond? Nastrond. And selkie is putting Azrael soul in Galen body to wake up, yes?” Raven yawned again.

  “Exactly right!” Wendy smiled at her husband.

  For a moment they looked each other in the eyes, smiling with love. To Raven, her happy looks were a treasure he had thought never to see again. Then he remembered it was a stolen treasure, bought by murder.

  Raven shouted: “Look at road, not at me!” Then, after the car was straightened and traveling in its proper lane again: “Where is van we are following?” He wondered why he had let a woman drive who just this evening had been released from a sick ward in the hospital.

  “He must’ve seen us! He sped up and turned off and we lost them,” Wendy shook her head so that her black curls flew violently. “It’s a disaster! If Azrael gets to Everness first, anything could happen! I can’t believe you slept through my very first car chase ever in my life! It was just like in the movies! He did a U-turn and was going the wrong way down the road, and everything! His tires squealed, and smoke came out the back, and I had to floor it to keep up! It was great!”

  “Did that really happen?” asked Raven in wonder. He could not imagine the calm, burly man he met at the hospital doing such dangerous maneuvers.

  “Of course not. He just turned off the exit before I could stop. By the time I got turned around again, he was gone. But I like my version better. That’s the way I think I’ll say it in my diary. Or do you think diaries should be totally honest? Anyway, it surprised me because the road to Route AA doesn’t turn off yet for fifteen miles. He’s not going the right way.”

  Raven squinted, rubbing his eyes and forehead. ‘And how is it you know right way and he does not?”

  “Silly! Galen told me when he was a ghost!”

  “And now we are driving to. . .?”

  “To Everness House. It may be locked up, but maybe you can break in. We have to find the Silver Key before Azrael gets it, because I bet he’s trying to open the gates to the dream-world and let the black hordes of Acheron come to Earth and conquer it! Don’t make a mess when we’re searching, though. It’s not our house.”

  “Hm. Yes. Of course. You know I must be back at my post day after tomorrow. I am standing evening shift, Sunday evening, Monday morning early. Must count logs logging company bringing off north slope preserve.”

  “That gives us the whole weekend! I’m sure we can save the world from conquest by an empire of fallen angels from beyond the edge of space and time long before that.”

  “Ah.”

  She looked at him sidelong. “And what is that Ah’ supposed to mean?”

  “Is just, Ah,’ you know. Ordinary, Ah.’ “

  “That’s no ordinary Ah.’ I know your Ah,’ Raven son of Raven! That was a nasty Ah.’ “

  “Was not a nasty Ah.’ “

  “It was! It was the nastiest Ah’ I ever heard. How could you!”

  “How could I what?”

  Wendy said, “Don’t you believe me?”

  Raven opened his mouth to answer and paused.

  III

  Did he believe his wife? She was crazy, he knew, but the question had never really come up before. It didn’t matter whether she thought she had a father who could do everything or a mother of supreme beauty; it didn’t matter whether she thought she had flown once when she was sick as a child. Whether or not those things were true did not call upon Raven to take any action.

  And even now, whether or not Wendy had talked with a ghost did not call for Raven to do anything irrevocable. Perhaps they could poke around this house (if Wendy actually found it), and no great harm would be done. Even if they got involved in some lengthy adventure, Raven had a government job, and he probably could not get fired even if he missed several days of work. He was a Georgian national, and he was sure that was a minority in America, and he knew the district manager had said their region was low on their minority quota.

  So it did not matter, really, if Raven believed or not, did it?

  But then again . . .

  It occurred to Raven that if he did not believe his wife, then none of this actually happened. It was a dream, a delusion. Galen Waylock was safely going home with his father; Wendy had experienced a miraculous spontaneous recovery. No more than that.

  It would be so very easy. All he need do is forget the looming figure in skeletal armor and then forget putting the pale white murder weapon into the thin gray hand . . .

  Raven shook his head ruefully. A sensation of contempt crawled through him for a moment, then passed. “Of course I believe you, my wife. I know there are unnatural things in the world, things men do not know. Me, I am seeing things that no one can explain. My father brought me out of Russia in a way no one can explain. I could not forget that there is magic in this world any more than I could forget my own name! And so I know we must go to Everness.”

  “Okay! But I wonder where Azrael is going?”

  Now Raven laughed. It was clear to him. ‘Azrael cannot drive van, no? And you did not talk to Peter, his father. I talk to Peter. Ha! Peter, he will not take his son back to Everness no matter what. Must be going to motel, or maybe to Peter’s house. He doesn’t live at Everness; does not like the place.”

  “He’s lost his faith, I bet.”

  Raven shrugged. “I think sometimes it is very easy to talk yourself out of believing in things. Easier that way. Do not be so hard on him if you have not been tempted, you know?”

  Wendy laughed. “People made fun of me, too. It would have been a lot easier to pretend nothing unusual ever happened. And I bet it would have been a lot easier on Jesus if he had pretended he couldn’t turn water into wine, or heal the sick. Easier isn’t always best.”

  Raven stroked his beard. He should have known better than to expect Wendy to feel any pity or sympathy for someone who betrayed his convictions or who gave into peer pressure. No pity at all.

  Wendy squinted. “Maybe a week.”

  “Maybe a week what?”

  “Maybe a week before Azrael fi
gures out a way to get to the House. He might see someone on TV call a cab, or get an idea how to do it from that. Or get a neighbor to drive him.”

  But Raven was nodding off again. As his chin sank down to his breastbone, he heard a woman’s crystalline and lovely voice say, “You have been shown these things for a purpose. Uhnuman is where Galen’s life has been taken. Even now, the Eech-Uisge have arrived at the frozen plateau above the plains of Luuk,. . .”

  Raven jerked his head up. “What?”The car had stopped. They were on a small back road, and the moon shown down on tall gateposts of dark brick. Beyond the open gates, a dirt path reached between double rows of trees sleeping beneath the moonlight. In the distance, Raven could hear the sea.

  Wendy said, “We’ve arrived where Galen lives. Look!”

  IV

  The place was not what Raven expected. It was a small, one-story, boxlike cabin, with an attached garage with aluminum siding. The square little cabin squatted in a dip of land, surrounded by tall trees, as if deliberately placed here to be hidden from any view. Raven heard the pounding of waves and smelled the scent of an herb garden, heard the rustling of autumn leaves in the ocean breeze. But neither the sea cliffs nor the gardens could be seen from this vantage.

  Nor was this little cabin visible from the tree-lined drive; only Raven’s sharp eye had caught the tire tracks in the grass leading to this secluded spot. The tree-lined drive continued toward the sea; and Raven and Wendy had not yet discovered what lay further along the way.

  Raven straightened up from the grass before the threshold. It was hard to tell in the dark, even with the flashlight from the glove compartment of the car, but he said, “No one has been here for months. Look; new shoots came up in summer where dirt path was; is now fall; no bent stems.”