by Rex Baron
Elizabeth opened her eyes and looked up into the handsome face she recognized as belonging to her own time.
“Welcome back,” Marc said, smiling down at her.
“Did you get any of it recorded?” she asked, licking the dryness away from her lips.
“Every word,” he answered. “I don't know where the hell you were, but it didn't sound like a great vacation spot to me.”
Chapter Seven
UCLA Library
The emotions seemed so real, Elizabeth thought to herself as she waited for the university librarian to retrieve the microfilm she had requested at the front desk. She was remembering the feeling of the experiment she had performed on herself the evening before. It was as if they were her own thoughts of dread and betrayal that she experienced in the body and memories of another. The link to this other time was strong, stronger than she had ever thought possible. And she knew that because she had recognized the existence of her aunt's lost world, she had somehow created a relationship with it and resurrected it into a new and vital form, here in the present. It was as if she had gone back in time through the eye of a needle, picked up the thread of memory and pulled it into the present. And now, it existed for her as real.
The librarian glowered at Elizabeth, then down at the stack of film in her hand.
Elizabeth broke away from her pondering.
“I'm sorry,” she whispered, “I wasn't paying attention.” The plain woman raised a brow in judgment and turned away.
“Excuse me,” Elizabeth leaned toward her, “but do you have any biographies of personages in opera... early Twentieth century... European, American?”
“That's not my department,” the woman answered with a feeble sigh of annoyance. She pointed to the dim recesses of the library reading room. “Perhaps you might try over there in the stacks.”
Elizabeth ventured into the dark labyrinth, smelling of dust and age old wax. As she examined the shelves of biographies, she saw an elderly woman, stretching herself up on her toes to replace a book on a high shelf.
“May I help you?” Elizabeth asked.
“No thank you,” the old woman said without turning around. Buoyantly, she tipped herself on Pointe and blithely tossed the book into its resting place. “I'm really quite used to it. In fact, it's the only real exercise I get,” she said with a sound in her throat that could pass for a girlish giggle.
When she turned around, Elizabeth found herself smiling into the pale eyes of Miss Auriel. The old woman shifted the position of her head and adjusted the impeccable chignon of white hair at the back of her head.
“Whatever are you doing here?” Elizabeth heard herself ask with surprise.
“I should think that a dark corner of the public library would be an infinitely more suitable haunt for someone of my age than a young woman like you. So, I suppose I might be more justified in asking the same question of you,” Miss Auriel replied with an evasive little grin.
Elizabeth was so startled to see the Art Therapist that she had to think for a moment before she could remember why she had come in the first place.
“I'm doing some research… on the opera,” she explained. “The woman at the desk said I might find books here that mentioned famous singers.”
Elizabeth felt uneasy confiding even this small amount of information regarding her experiments. It seemed to her that behind her harmless cornflower blue eyes, the old woman was appraising her, calculating the value of what she said, and in some way, estimating her worth.
“Perhaps I might be able to help… if I knew who in particular you were looking for. There are a lot of people in opera.”
Elizabeth hesitated.
“No, I wouldn’t think of troubling you,” she said.
Taking little notice of the answer, Miss Auriel carefully fitted another thin volume into its home on a more accessible shelf.
“Nonsense,” she huffed. “It's no bother. I have reason to know quite a bit about opera, if I say so myself.”
“She was a singer…” Elizabeth said, giving in to the other woman's persistence, “a Mezzo Soprano, I think. Her name was Lucy von Dorfen.”
The old lady’s eyes narrowed and took on the liquid shine of a young girl's.
“A Soprano,” she said, correcting Elizabeth. “She was a glorious Soprano, not a Mezzo Soprano. She was a German girl, but popular in her day… here in America too.”
Elizabeth blinked in confusion, surprised at the woman's seemingly effortless command of the subject.
“You'll find her in Ledbetter's History of the International Song… and of course in Cobbs, Operas of the World and Oper Liedernmeistern… if you can read German,” Miss Auriel stated with efficiency. She placed a finger on her head as if to prod her brain into dropping another egg of information. “No, that's all I'm going to get for now,” she said, as if explaining the phenomenon.
Elizabeth thanked her and started toward the card catalog, when Miss Auriel called after her in a loud whisper.
“I almost forgot. If it’s Lucy von Dorfen you're after, you might also want to try the occult section. She's only mentioned a time or two, mostly as a descendant of occultists and high Free Masons, on a par with the Borgheses and Marie Antoinette,” she stated matter-of-factly, as if she expected Elizabeth to understand what that meant. “She wasn't really into it much though, I can tell you that. Therein lies the rub, as our friend Shakespeare would have said.”
Elizabeth could feel the pale eyes follow her across the room as she placed her sweater on a chair and made for the card catalog. She flipped through the rows of countless cards and selected four books, including one from the occult file, then, eagerly proceeded to the monitors to view the microfilm of the newspapers articles from 1921.
For over an hour she searched the pages of the New York Times for a theater review written by someone named Reginald Christian, but found nothing. Suddenly, she remembered that a newspaper called the New York Herald operated until sometime in the late sixties. Carefully, she went back through the frames of film until she found the newspaper of that name bearing the date: Sept. 21, 1921
A section called “Toast of the Town” drew her attention with the byline under it... Reginald Christian. Halfway down the column, she found the name Lucy von Dorfen and slowed down to read the paragraph.
“Last evening, the Metropolitan Opera was filled with an unprecedented collection of well-heeled patrons clamoring to see David Montague's new adaptation of Doctor Faustus. But the theater glittered for one reason more than usual. It was because of the presence of America's newest import, the charming and sensational Soprano Lucy von Dorfen, just in from Germany. In the role of Helen of Troy, she shone like a new star on our horizon, a welcome beacon directing this provincial old town to a new threshold of culture and international sophistication. When this old doughboy was asked if I'd ever seen anything like her, when we were over there in ’17, I had to answer, never. When the captivating Lucy was asked what she thought of Americans, she wittily responded: “Americans are not as well dressed as Europeans, but their jewels are real and twice as big.”
Elizabeth's hands trembled on the controls as the resounding truth that she had seen the past, as it had actually happened, came crashing through to her. She moved the film back and read it again to be certain that her eyes were not playing tricks on her. Her blood had proved true as a link to the world of her ancestors, and she felt the presence of her aunt somehow deep inside her. She finally knew for certain that Lucy's memories and the life she had lived were now somehow hers as well. She found herself suddenly wanting to know everything she could about this long silent part of her identity, and moved to a reading table to examine the stack of books suggested by her odd little acquaintance. She opened the first of the opera histories to the index and scanned the narrow columns for the name now suddenly familiar to her in a new and personal way.
Each of the books was dry and academic in recording the history of the art form. The names of the famous o
r once famous appeared again and again in varying associations with well-known works and seemed to fade in and out of prominence, like strands of gold thread woven in a tapestry of time and music.
Only the German text included welcome photographs under the heading of “Notable Twentieth Century Voices.”
Elizabeth stumbled through the text, able to do little more than pick out an occasional word here and there, stringing them together into tenuous meaning. She turned the page and was surprised to see a caption under a full-page photograph of a young woman that read, “Soprano Margarit, Lucy von Dorfen, Star Schauspielerin von dem Stadt Oper, Berlin.” She stared into the eyes of the unfamiliar face on the page, trying to find some reflection of herself. The face was very young and pretty, in a delicate, pale way that was not her own, yet, after a moment, her imagination began to create possible memories of the dress she wore on the day the photograph was taken and her conscious mind began to cloud the sensation of wakefulness with a jumble of wishful guesses and romantic illusion.
Immediately, she closed the book and concentrated to rein in her runaway imagination. It was counter-productive to know too much about the woman, she warned herself. After all, the more she knew in advance of her aunt, the less valuable her dream impressions would be. By knowing virtually nothing about the personal life of her subject, her subconscious could not be accused of weaving in the small details gathered from research before the fact. She must remain unaware of those details until they were furnished while in the dream state of the experiment.
She sat back and surveyed the room, taking in what felt like her first breath since she'd had her revelation with the microfilm. She glanced over to where the bird-like Miss Auriel had watched her, but was relieved to see only a chubby freshman girl anxiously staring at the shelves of books in trance-like bewilderment.
She longed for a cigarette, but held to her resolve to abstain and get into shape. She thought of Lucy and felt, in a way that she knew to be absurd, that she now owed the maintenance of her body to her as well.
“We are the sum total of everyone we have ever been and carry the memories of everyone who has ever shared our blood,” she reminded herself softly.
She looked down to see her hand resting on the cover of another of the books, as if it had crept there unnoticed, intending to open it while her mind was preoccupied with its musing. The book was Roget Park's, The Tree of Good and Evil- A History of The Wisdom and Occultism in the Western Tradition.
In spite of her resolve to remain uninformed in the affairs of her ancestor, she could not resist the temptation to see what the author had to say about her aunt's involvement in this shadowy world of magic and religion. Only one page number appeared next to the name in the index, and she quickly turned to page two-hundred and six to find one line informing her that her great aunt had reputedly been a member of the Golden Dawn Society, an early spiritualist organization that took root in Theosophy and attracted many of the most notable writers and celebrities of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Elizabeth turned the page, disappointed by the scrap of information, which was to her mind old news.
Her eyes wandered over the pages that followed, looking at pictures and picking up unrelated snatches of the text, like bits of lint from a carpet.
She turned to a page describing how the Middle Ages had been so overrun with witches and those practicing the Kraft, that Queen Elizabeth the First of England passed a bill calling for the execution of over 70,000, according to one estimate. The account went on to list famous places commonly frequented by those sorcerers and practitioners. The Tower of Witches in Lindheim was reputedly a place to gather, as was the Old Women's Mountain in Carpathia, or the mountaintops of Heuberg and Köterberg in Germany, and the Paterno di Bologna in Italy.
Those who were suspected of involvement in the Kraft could be singled out as a betrayer of the Church, because of a flawless complexion or the ability to carry a tune. One could be labeled an enchantress, an incantatrix or a necromancer based solely on the length and color of one's hair.
Elizabeth read on, following a list of physical traits that the inquisitors used as conclusive proof that they had a bonafide heretic in their grasp. She read to herself in a low, audible whisper, distracting a man at the same table from his copy of the Illustrated News. He looked up disapprovingly and Elizabeth lapsed into silence.
An evil Soul takes the guise of a hag, stooped and wizened, or that of a fair youth. They might be recognized by the absence of a posterior arse, and often carry a small mole on the outside heel of each foot. They are also known by the mark of the Devil, left on either shoulder, made when Satan himself placed his mouth there in the choosing. A true witch may be destroyed only by means of fire, or by strangulation with a white cord. They are carried buoyant on the surface of the water and are unknown to die from drowning. Likewise, they have no fear of aging and mortality as others do, and are impervious to pain, especially in the region of the lower back and may be beaten about this region with little consequence to their comfort.
Elizabeth looked up from her reading.
Marc had felt no pain from the accident at the beach. That was what had been so freakish, she thought with an overwhelming rush of uneasiness. He had even told her, at the time, that he felt nothing. She was certain that he had been in shock and covered him with a blanket. But she remembered how placid his expression was as he slept, hardly the sleep of one who had nearly been broken in two on a jagged reef. Could there be a correlation between his remarkable recovery and the sinister description of a witch she had just read?
“Are you losing your mind?” she asked aloud, causing the man with the newspaper to furrow his brow and move himself to a more distant seat.
In the back of her mind, she had wondered about the accident for days. At first she had secretly feared that she had caused it, and on some subconscious level had willed it, because she disapproved of Marc's persistence in the notion of attempting witchcraft. But there had been more to it than that. It was the accident itself that caused her mind to relive it again and again. Marc had been so violently cast against the rocks that he might have drowned. No, she told herself, trying to put the suspicion out of her mind. Anyone else surely would have drowned, especially considering the panic and shock, and the pain from the open wound in salt water. Yet, she kept remembering his face in the water as she swam out to him. It was placid and unmoved, his voice calm and firm. He had told her exactly what to do. He needed her help to swim the distance since the muscle in his back had been injured and he could not do it without assistance. And yet, he was not afraid, and appeared to be in no pain whatever. That was what had bothered her from the start.
Was it possible that he could be a witch? Her mind raced with the idea. But witches were always women, she told herself. The men were wizards or warlocks, or whatever other term of magical power had been invented for children's stories. She read the description once again from the book. “A fair youth,” it said. Surely that could mean a man as well as a woman. Perhaps he belonged to this company without being aware of it, in the same way that she had been unaware of the presence of her Great Aunt Lucy in her living blood, until only a day before.
Elizabeth felt unsteady and her mind recoiled, causing the chair in which she sat and the table under her books to rumble and creak with the low noise of subtle movement. Everyone in the room held a single breath, and watched in frozen helplessness as the light fixtures overhead swayed in unison, and the glass cabinets, protecting the books, rattled as if provoked by a passing train.
The librarian braced herself in a narrow doorway as the word earthquake made its way around the great room with the speed of the tremor itself.
When it was over, Elizabeth felt drawn and weak. She no longer cared to ask herself if the phenomenon had been of her own making. She raised her eyes from the harmless wood grain of the tabletop and saw little Miss Auriel tucked between two narrow shelves, holding onto the frame of one of th
em to steady herself. Her face reflected none of the inner fear or confusion that her advanced age might warrant. Instead, her expression was calm and resolute as she stared out across the open space between them, holding Elizabeth in her gaze, penetrating her with a look of interest and complete understanding.
Chapter Eight
Pacific Palisades
The doorbell summoned Elizabeth from her morning shower. She wrapped a towel around herself and padded barefoot down the hallway to the front door of her apartment, grumbling to herself about the audacity of people to turn up unannounced.
She peeked outside, through the curtain at the side of the door panel, to see Tom standing on the doorstep. She opened the door a crack and held the towel modestly up near her throat, covering her body.
“Tom, what a nice surprise,” she said almost convincingly. “I'm afraid you've got me at a bad time. I was just in the shower.”
Tom laughed. It was an entirely unexpected response, far off the mark from the polite and apologetic withdrawal she had hoped for.
“Pardon my laughing,” he drawled, as he shifted from foot to foot nervously. “But although I appreciate your modesty, covering yourself with the towel and all, I think I should tell you your whole back side is plainly visible through this little window next to the door over here.”
Elizabeth instantly closed the door, then reopened it a moment later, wearing the towel in a more customary sarong fashion. She could not hide the redness of her face as she asked him to come in.
Tom stepped inside as Elizabeth backed toward the bedroom, intent on getting into less compromising attire. As she dressed, Tom shouted his one-sided conversation to her from the living room.