by Rex Baron
Marc did not know what to say. It was not as if he really loved Elizabeth, and he had put her and the world she represented so far out of his mind in the last weeks that the very idea of returning to it, even for a second, seemed unfathomable.
“The dark force requires you to deliver her Soul to us. She is our natural enemy, on the side of opposition to individual Will. She and others like her promote a collective Will and the relinquishing of personal power, a consequence that we must never allow. You must kill her.”
“But how should I do it?” he asked. “Is there some magic I should use to make it happen, some ritual to make it correct and binding?”
Helen threw her head back in gales of mocking laughter.
“You are one of us,” she said. “You have whatever means you need available to you. You will find a way.”
The face began to fade before him, and he knew the time was growing short.
“What if something goes wrong?” he asked, as his own image slowly emerged in the place where his mother's had been.
“It has been asked of you,” Helen's voice called out from oblivion. “You must not fail.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Franklin Avenue, Hollywood
Elizabeth knew she must speak with the ancient therapist from the Croft school. She had telephoned several times, but was told that Miss Auriel was not expected for several days, and that for security reasons, they were unable to divulge her number. She thought of going to the university library where they had last crossed paths, but she did not want to risk a chance meeting with one of her students, who would eye her with pity, or a colleague who might stop her and question her about the details of her untimely and unlikely resignation. In frustration, Elizabeth scanned the telephone directory until she came to an E. Auriel listed at an address on Franklin Avenue, in an older part of Hollywood. She telephoned again and again, to determine if it was the old woman, but there was no reply.
The afternoon sun had already cooled and the color of the sky turned to violet against the darkening silhouette of the trees when Elizabeth arrived.
As she approached a small bungalow-style house, nestled amongst a thick cluster of waxy foliage, she spotted the corroded number, stamped into a wrought iron fence on the corner lot. The house had been nearly consumed by oversized date palms smelling of spoiled fruit, and twists of bougainvilleas that insulated the property from the outside, which sat within a network of florid and mysterious protection.
She judged the house to be from the Twenties. It was covered in stucco and tinted in a pinkish color that had faded, like aging flesh, as the trees grew up around the façade, closing out the sunlight and sealing in the essence of a more innocent age.
Elizabeth left her car and stood in front of the house, not knowing whether to approach unannounced. She heard voices around her as the light grew dimmer, and the house seemed to recede farther back with each successive moment. They were not voices from the busy street a block away, but her voices, those that whispered to her in the dark. She recognized her name being spoken, mingled with the sound of the dead leaves crumpling underfoot. They called her to draw closer into the overgrown yard, up the stairs to the front door.
She had no idea of what she might say if she found the elderly woman at home, but nevertheless, she rang the bell. After a moment, the door opened and the frail figure of Miss Auriel stood, back-lighted by the golden glow from the parlor room.
She motioned for Elizabeth to come in and stepped aside to usher her into a lovely room, as lost in time as the garden that guarded the trim little house. She seemed far more fragile than Elizabeth remembered her to be, and she stared at the tiny creature, wondering how it was possible that she could be the same person who had held Lara Raymond to the floor and masterfully drawn out the evil that possessed her. Miss Auriel caught the puzzled expression on Elizabeth's face, and her mouth turned up into an enigmatic smile.
“I'm sorry for dropping in like this. I'm afraid, you'll think me a lunatic,” Elizabeth explained awkwardly.
“You're not... are you?” the old woman asked playfully, as she took Elizabeth's jacket and carefully draped it over an upholstered chair.
Elizabeth let out a nervous little sigh. “I'm honestly not sure any more,” she replied. “Things have been very strange of late, as if my whole world were shaking to bits.” She stopped herself and drew back from the unsolicited intimacy of her confession. “I'm really very sorry to just barge in on you. I tried to telephone you several times, but there didn't seem to be anyone home.”
Her hostess placed two straight-backed chairs in front of the fireplace and settled cozily into one of them like a bird settling into her nest. She motioned for Elizabeth to occupy the other.
“I've been expecting you,” she answered with a knowing smile. “I must explain that I find the telephone a great nuisance... all that annoying ringing. I realize I have to have it because I'm old and there might be an emergency, or the school might ring me, but I never use it to call people. I use my mind to do that.”
Elizabeth blinked in disbelief at what she was hearing.
“You are correct in your assumption, my dear,” she continued. “I've been trying to contact you all afternoon... and here you are. I guess, I'm not as old and feeble as others think.” She leaned forward and winked at Elizabeth, as if the gesture carried with it some secret confidence.
“Will you have tea? The water is already boiling. I expected you about half an hour ago,” Miss Auriel explained, as she pushed herself up and out of the chair, and spryly started for the kitchen. “I suppose you stood outside on the street for a while before venturing up the walk... The polite ones always do.”
While she clattered with the tea things in the pantry, Elizabeth surveyed the room. It seemed a perfect reflection of the frail creature who lived there, a collection of substantial oak furnishings, a mahogany piano draped in an embroidered Spanish shawl, and a Tiffany lamp in the shape of an egret holding its frosted globe over a reading table, cluttered with bric-a-brac and souvenirs of long ago. It was a lifetime gathered in one room, a capsule of another time, as appointed and complete as could be found in any museum exhibition.
Elizabeth strained her eyes to examine a row of photographs on a sideboard, under a large ornate mirror. The black and white images, now mostly faded to shades of brown, showed what she recognized as the skyline of old New York, along with a variety of vacation and holiday photos, taken in rural regions, long since developed, and aboard gleaming ocean liners, now sadly out of service.
The room had been successful in capturing time, as if each naive print and mission chair had frozen in place the day the news came out that Rudolph Valentino had died.
Elizabeth heard a giggle from the hallway followed by the little woman supporting a large tea tray. Elizabeth jumped to her feet and helped her navigate it to a small side table next to the fireplace.
“I know you must be thinking how cozy and unchanged my house is, as if I've lived here all my life,” Miss Auriel said with an impish grin. “I'm sorry to be disappointing, but I would be telling a lie, if I didn't admit that I've only been here a few years. As you've already noticed from my photographs, I pride myself on being a traveler, and have spent most of my life shuffling the world in search of information.”
She poured the tea into two cups and offered one to Elizabeth.
“To get to the point, as they say, I bought the house as you see it, with all the furnishings, a few years ago. I like it because it reminded me of a lovely house where I spent one summer out here in California, in my girlhood. And now that I’ve lived here for a while and done my work as an Art Therapist, I find I have the interest to move on again... at least one more time... I think, back to a lovely village in Cornwall, England, where I spent a very important part of my life. I suppose I’ve reached that time when sentimentality rules the day and one is completely governed by such whims of nostalgia.”
Elizabeth sipped her tea, wondering how she
might best put her questions concerning her great aunt to the old woman, and why it seemed she had such ready information about Lucy's life. Instead, she stated the obvious.
“I hope Lara Raymond is better.”
Miss Auriel's eyes twinkled at her from above her teacup.
“Tell me dear, what is it you wanted to know about Lucy von Dorfen? I presume that is why you've come.”
Elizabeth swallowed the hot liquid in her mouth and nodded simultaneously. “I am trying to find out what happened to her... it's part of an experiment really, for my work at the university,” Elizabeth lied.
“She was lost at sea.” The simple answer drifted over the edge of the cup with the steam, as the old woman drank her tea.
Elizabeth shifted anxiously, not knowing where to begin.
“I know that's what the official accounts say, and of course, she had drowned. But I can't help feeling there was more to it than that.”
“Feeling... an interesting choice of words,” Miss Auriel said, bringing her cup down carefully on its saucer and placing them on the serving tray. “What do you mean by that, and what makes you think I know anything that the historians don't?”
Elizabeth tried to organize the information in her brain so that she would not sound incoherent or insane. She explained that Lucy was a relation and how she sought more information than the simple paragraph in a reference book that noted her aunt's involvement in the world of the Golden Dawn and the occult wisdom.
“I know who you are,” Miss Auriel informed her, as she held her in the steady gaze of her pale blue eyes. “The minute you told me your name that first day at the school, I recognized you as one of the von Dorfen line. I knew, sooner or later, you would have to come to me.”
“But I told you my name was Winslow,” Elizabeth corrected her.
“The surname is of no consequence. The mother's name is the name we look for.”
Elizabeth returned the old woman's certainty with an expression of confusion.
“Now, let's talk about you for a minute. Tell me what it is you really want to know,” Miss Auriel said, folding her hands in her lap, like a schoolmistress awaiting a recitation from an accomplished student. She had a look of satisfaction on her face, and she sat back more comfortably in her chair, as if already enjoying what she was about to hear.
Without hesitation, the flood gates of Elizabeth's mind opened, pouring forth an anxious account of how the furniture moved around her whenever she was alone, and how the accompanying voices mocked her as she tried to sleep, forcing her to lie awake with the lamps turned on, fearing for her sanity. Miss Auriel listened attentively. The mention of the flying coffee pot caused a broad smile to appear over the old woman's face, and her voice erupted in a soft little chuckle of amusement.
“You mustn't be so fearful, my dear,” she said. “The problem is that you are a scientist and you are trying to be too scientific. You try to see things in terms of physics, and restrict them to what is happening in the physical world. But as a Parapsychologist, you know the mind is the key factor. That's why you are afraid you are losing yours,” Miss Auriel said with a kindly smile. “Have no fear, you're not. You are as sane as I am, if that is any consolation to you.” She placed a comforting hand on Elizabeth's knee. “What you have described as your voices and the ability to move objects is, in fact, a part of the Wisdom, part of the power that has been lost to most of us. They are abilities that we all had at one time, when the ancient Greeks could hear voices in the winds and the Egyptians used their collective mind to move the great stones for the pyramids. You are not insane, merely gifted, and therefore able to remember how the brain of our ancestors functioned in the dim and distant past. It is your gift. You are one of those chosen to keep it alive.”
“But why me?” Elizabeth asked, as she ran her fingers nervously through her hair.
“You were born to it,” Miss Auriel answered flatly.
“Then you are telling me that I have inherited this ability, contracted this witch thing at birth. It's just lying there in my blood, like a disease, and there is nothing I can do about it.”
Miss Auriel smiled. She rose from her chair and poured a small glass of sherry, then handed it to Elizabeth. “Now, I think, is the proper time for this. It might boost you up a bit and settle your nerves.”
Elizabeth took the glass and swallowed the warm sticky liquid.
“You are wondering how I know so much about all this, aren't you?” her companion asked. “You came to me for some simple historical information and we find ourselves talking about something quite different altogether.”
She reached at the back of the photo collection on the sideboard and lifted a small oval frame. She returned to her seat, all the while staring at it, a look of loving wonderment on her face. She handed it to Elizabeth.
In the small silver frame, two young girls stared back at her with glowing eyes. Their youthful features were carefully painted in the style of the Twenties, and offset by patterned scarves, wrapped glamorously around their heads.
“You seem to have a contempt for the power,” Miss Auriel said. “You think that those who deal with the higher forces are hated by God, horrible hags and demons to be feared and destroyed. They are not. Do these two girls look as if they are to be feared?”
“They are lovely,” Elizabeth replied.
Miss Auriel tapped the edge of the frame with her fingertip. “That's me on the right, taken over sixty years ago. And that's your Aunt Lucy next to me.”
Elizabeth's mouth opened in surprise, and she looked up into the sparkling blue eyes that mirrored those in the photograph.
“We are not creatures of dread, and neither are you.” The old woman smiled warmly. She motioned toward the decanter of sherry, offering another, and Elizabeth nodded her head. “You see, my dear, we have much in common,” she said. “I have a power or two of my own as well.”
“Then my aunt was a practicing witch?”
“Alas, she was not. That, I'm afraid, was the fatal flaw,” the Art Therapist said, returning the photo to its place behind the others. “She had it in her blood, just as you do, but never learned to use it. She denied her birthright in exchange for a singing career. She would have been numbered among the greatest, if her life had not been cut short by the venomous Helen Liluth.”
“Then she was murdered?” Elizabeth asked, jerking forward on the edge of her chair.
“Yes, but not in a conventional way, not in a way that the police could tell. She had been spellbound and hadn't the power or wherewithal to defend herself.”
“But why? What possible reason could anyone have?” Elizabeth asked, rubbing her temples to soothe her pounding head.
Miss Auriel rose from the fire and rummaged through a collection of books on a shelf of her library, as if searching for something in particular.
“There are several reasons why Helen Liluth killed your aunt, the least of them being to steal her career,” the old woman answered without looking up from her search. “There are many of us, like yourself, who have the power and have been the recipients of the Wisdom as it is handed down from mother to daughter over the ages. The thing that must never be forgotten, is that the use of the same power is divided into two opposing camps. There are those who represent the White Lodge, and only use the forces of the universe for good, or to carry out the work of the Divine plan… and then, there are those who follow the sinister and self-serving purposes of the Dark Lodge. It is that simple, as separate and irreconcilable as dark and light.”
Elizabeth listened in rapt silence as the old woman continued.
“Your family, a few generations ago, was known for working on the side of light, although one must remember that in these matters, the intention of the heart is the only thing that separates an act of good from an act of evil. Sometimes it is very hard to see the difference. Destruction is destruction, unless one must destroy in order to save. So you see, my dear, it's all relative… and speaking of relatives...”
>
She pulled a thin volume from the shelf and ran her finger down an index at the back, then turned to a designated page farther forward.
“Ah, here we are,” she said, as she began to read. “Helen Liluth, noted opera singer and motion picture actress of the silent era, recognized for her dramatic theatrical style and daring operatic interpretation… that means she couldn't sing,” Miss Auriel added an editorial comment, “…debuted at the New York Metropolitan Opera in the role of Isolde, in Wagner's opera Tristan and Isolde, and toured extensively in Europe until the late nineteen twenties. She is best known as a sculptress of monumental works in stone, which aided in the aggrandizement of the national policies of the National Socialist Party during the rise of Germany's Third Reich, and was reportedly lost in the fall of Berlin in 1945.”
Miss Auriel's lips moved silently for a moment, then she looked up at Elizabeth with triumph. “There is a footnote, a codicil to that account,” she said, tapping the open page of the book with her finger. “It says here that Helen did not die in the war, as assumed, but surfaced again sometime after in Texas, where it said she was held under the surveillance of a local coven for two years, until she finally gained membership. She actually died in 1969 and is survived by a son, Marc Patrick.”
Miss Auriel snapped the book closed and returned it to the shelf.
“You will notice,” she said, “there is no mention of husbands or married names. We are dealing with the women here, the power of Binah, the mother goddess, handed down through the generations by women. Please, do not misunderstand that a man cannot possess the power. He can, of course, as long as it is inherited from a powerful mother... like your friend Marc unfortunately has, my dear.”
Elizabeth held her head in her hands. Marc was not only one of them, but the inheritor of a dark and murderous power in opposition to her own.
“I don't understand,” she protested. “All those descriptions I've read in books about the true appearance of a witch, all that nonsense about the mark of Satan on the shoulder of some stooped-over hag. Marc isn't anything like that.”