The Magic Circle

by Katherine Neville

  After what seemed the eternity of a bad dream, my skis struck snow—and simultaneously my arm smashed into rock. The jagged edges ripped through the sleeve of my silver moonsuit like a serrated knife; I felt the slash of flesh parting, ripped from elbow to shoulder. The impact knocked me sharply sideways, off balance. Though there was no pain yet, I felt a sickening throb as the warm, wet blood soaked into my sleeve.

  The forest of rugged rock flashed by me in a blur. I struggled frantically to stay on my feet. But I was moving too fast, without poles for balance. I caught an edge and spun out, whirling sideways and then flipping head over heels. I was somersaulting out of control, my skis striking rocks, knocking the binding locks open. But to my surprise, more than once when I smashed into a boulder, the thickness of the backpack actually protected me.

  My shoulders and shins weren’t so lucky: they were smashed into rock after rock. I felt the deep bruises blossoming as I tried to protect my head with my ragged and bloody arm. One loose ski flipped up and whacked me on the forehead. Blood splashed into my eye. In the end I was hurled up against a megalith, and I came to a stop—but not to a rest.

  I was battered and bleeding, the pain was starting to throb, but the pounding roar above me told me I had no time for a tuneup just now. Snow and debris were flying into the gorge from up the mountain. The air was so dense with rubble, it darkened the sky. Whole trees, roots and all, were hurled into space above me. My jump had given me enough of a head start downhill that I did have a chance to beat it, but only if I kept moving.

  I struggled to get up and set my skis—still dragging from my ankles by their loose safety thongs—beside my feet as fast as possible. I snapped into my step-locks and started to skate off down the couloir of ice and snow, threading swiftly between the rocks, just as Wolfgang Hauser caught up with me, breathing hard.

  “Christ, Ariel, you’re a mess,” he said between gasps.

  “I’m alive, and nothing’s broken,” I told him as we raced side by side to avoid the coming onslaught that was drowning our voices. “How about you?”

  “I’m fine,” he yelled back. “But thank God you jumped. The entire bowl collapsed. Once you ran out of woods, you’d have been trapped between two avalanches with nothing to stop them.”

  “Holy shit!” I said, glancing at Wolfgang.

  He laughed and shook his head. “My sentiments precisely.”

  At the far end of the gorge was another sheer cliff rising above us. But a curved ramp of snow-covered rock led to it, which we herringbone-stepped our way up, on our skis. Halfway up this ramp, Wolfgang stopped and looked back toward the end of the gorge we’d just come from. As I came up, he laid his gloved hand on my shoulder in silence, and nodded in that direction. I was already a little giddy from loss of blood, but when I followed his gaze, I felt my stomach heave. I hunkered down and wrapped my arms around the ankles of my boots.

  The entire valley had disappeared. The sea of black stones we’d just ribboned through had completely vanished. What had been a gorge was now stuffed nearly to the brim with dirty white rubble, roots and branches sticking up clawing the sky. The only landmark left was that lip of cliff we’d jumped from, protruding less than six feet above what was now the valley floor.

  I felt Wolfgang’s hand stroking my hair as I quivered in horror. We watched a last dusting of snow sift from the cliff and saw the raw, dark earth of the open slope beyond, raped of its white cover, where a few pebbles still tumbled down the hill. It was total devastation, all in less than ten minutes. I started to cry. Wolfgang pulled me to my feet without speaking and put his arms around me, stroking me until my sobs subsided. Then, pulling me away, he wiped the blood and tears from my face with his glove and brushed my forehead with his lips as if healing a frightened child.

  “We’d better get you cleaned up and mended. You’re a valuable creature,” he told me with a gentle smile. But the next words of the beautiful Dr. Hauser, though just as tender and solicitous, terrified me.

  “And more than valuable,” he said. “You’re quite amazing, my dear—to outski an avalanche without once losing hold of that manuscript in your backpack.” When I looked at him in genuine horror, he added, “Oh, I don’t have to see it to know what it is. I followed you to the mountain to be certain you wouldn’t hide it or lose it. If that’s the rune manuscript you have there, as I believe it is, then it belongs to me. I sent it to you myself.”

  THE MATRIX

  matrix (Latin=the womb) … that which encloses anything or gives origin to anything. A source, origin, or cause. From Greek=meter, mother.

  —The Century Dictionary

  In tragedy the tragic myth is reborn from the matrix of music. It inspires the most extravagant hopes, and promises oblivion of the bitterest pain.

  —Friedrich Nietzsche

  All that openeth the matrix is mine.

  —Exodus 34:19

  Anyone can make a mistake, but this was a humdinger. And mea culpa, mea culpa, the conclusions I’d leapt to were all mine.

  Sam had said nothing about runes, or even that what he’d sent me was a manuscript—only that it was the size of a few reams of paper. In a single day I’d nearly run over my landlord, fled across two states, and almost gotten run over myself, by an avalanche, while dallying with a gorgeous Austrian scientist. And all for the wrong parcel. I promised the gods I’d stop batting so many strikes if fate would stop throwing those curve balls. But that didn’t help solve my new crisis: the real package from Sam was still missing. And now, thanks to my overreaction, maybe Sam was, too.

  As I made my battered and bleeding way down the mountain, Wolfgang tried to fill me in about the rune manuscript he’d sent me—not an easy task on skis, especially since we were both anxious to reach the base camp clinic where I could get patched up. He did manage to explain en route that when he’d come to Idaho to start me on this project he’d intended to give me the manuscript first thing, but he found I was still off at Sam’s funeral. When I stayed away so long and his other professional commitments called him out of town, he put the runes in the mail so I’d get them when I returned. Then this morning when the Pod sent Olivier to look for me, Wolfgang took a drive by the post office himself. When he saw me take off in panic like that, he decided to round me up on his own.

  When Wolfgang and I got down the mountain, I asked him what the runes in my backpack were, and what I was to do with them when I couldn’t even read them. He explained they were a copy of a document he’d been asked by my family in Europe to bring me, and that it was his understanding that the runes were connected somehow with the manuscripts I’d just inherited from my cousin Sam. He said as soon as I got medical attention and we could sit down and talk in confidence, he’d explain everything else he knew.

  We spent an hour at the base camp clinic surrounded by astringent-smelling bottles and the pandemonium of the ski patrol dashing about with stretchers and beepers, hauling injured parties from the wounded mountain. In their midst I let the medicos slap me on a metal table, shoot me up, bandage my head, and put fourteen stitches in my arm.

  All chitchat between Wolfgang and me naturally had to be curtailed here in the chaos of the surgical theater. But I could still think private thoughts. I knew that our nuclear project couldn’t be a front for Wolfgang Hauser’s junket to Idaho. For starters, it was a given that he was a high-level official of the IAEA, or he couldn’t obtain clearance to set foot inside our site, much less to eyeball the U.S. government security files of somebody who had high-level clearance herself. So there was no question: he was legit.

  One key unanswered question still remained: How was it that Professor Dr. Wolfgang K. Hauser arrived in Idaho while I was off in San Francisco at Sam’s funeral? How had anyone known—as someone must have, in advance—that Sam’s death would place those other, still missing, documents in my hands?

  With me shot up with drugs by the surgeon and my stitched-up arm in a sling, Wolfgang and I agreed it would be best if he drove me hom
e in my car and had someone from the office come over to Jackson Hole and collect the government vehicle.

  The journey back home was rather a daze. The pain kicked in as soon as my anesthetic wore off. Then I remembered—too late, after taking the pill the doctor had given me—that I usually overreacted to codeine. In short order I felt as if I’d been hit over the head by a hammer. I was out cold for most of the trip, so my question was left unanswered.

  When we got back it was well past dark. Though later I couldn’t recall giving directions to my house or how we arrived there, I did remember sitting in the car in the driveway and Wolfgang asking whether he should keep my car to get himself to his hotel or come inside and phone for a taxi. My reply, and everything else, remained a blur.

  So imagine my surprise, upon awaking at dawn the next morning, to find myself tucked into my own bed, and my backpack and yesterday’s clothing—along with a stark black ski suit I suddenly realized, with a jolt, was not my own—all piled on a chair across the room! Under the covers, I seemed to be wearing nothing but my stretchy silk long johns, which left little to the imagination.

  I sat up with the covers spilling about me and saw the shaggy head, tanned arm, and bare muscular shoulders of Professor Dr. Wolfgang K. Hauser protruding from my sleeping bag on the floor. He stirred and rolled over on his back, and I could just make out his features in the early morning light sifting through the high transom windows: those thick dark lashes shadowing strong cheekbones, the long narrow nose, cleft chin, and sensual mouth, combining to suggest the profile of a Roman sculpture. Even in repose, he was the most beautiful man I’d ever seen. But what was he doing half-naked in a sleeping bag on my floor?

  Wolfgang Hauser’s eyes opened. He turned on his side, propped himself on one elbow, and smiled at me with those incredible turquoise eyes, like dangerous tidal pools with hidden currents. Like the river.

  “As you see, I stayed here overnight,” he said. “I hope you don’t think it was too forward. But when I helped you out of the car last night, you passed out in the driveway. I caught you just before you hit the ground. I got you down the steps somehow, and out of those torn and bloody clothes, and I put you straight to bed. I was afraid to leave here until the drugs wore off and I could be sure you were all right. And are you?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said, feeling my head still full of cotton wool and my arm still throbbing with heat. “But I’m grateful you stayed. You saved my life yesterday. If it weren’t for you, I might be at the bottom of that canyon right now under a mountain of snow and rubble. I’m still pretty shaken.”

  “You haven’t eaten a bite since last noon.” Wolfgang sat up and unzipped the sleeping bag. “But I have to leave town; thanks to yesterday I’m behind schedule. Why don’t I make you breakfast? I know where things are kept in your kitchen: your cat showed me last night. He seemed to expect me to make him dinner, so I did.”

  “I don’t believe it,” I said, laughing. “You saved my life, and you even fed my cat! By the way, where is Jason?”

  “Perhaps he’s being discreet,” said Wolfgang with a complicitous smile.

  Then, his back turned, he crawled out of the sleeping bag wearing nothing but his undershorts, grabbed his black jumpsuit from the chair, and pulled it on quickly. I couldn’t help but notice, even in just this brief glimpse from the back, that Professor Dr. Wolfgang K. Hauser had a truly magnificent physique. All sorts of dark, erotic visions suddenly flooded my brain. With these, to my horror, came the telltale hot flush of blood. Before he could turn and see hidden thoughts spelled out on my burning cheeks, I picked up a pillow and buried my face in it.

  Too late. I heard the sound of bare feet padding across the cold concrete floor. The springs squeaked as he sat on the edge of my bed. He pulled the pillow down and looked at me with those fathomless eyes. I felt his fingers brush my shoulder, and he drew me to him and kissed me.

  It isn’t as if no one had ever kissed me before. But this was nothing like any kiss I knew: no meaningful sighs, biting of lips, saliva, groping, or histrionics, as too often in my less than quotable past. Instead, when our lips met, a flood of energy was unleashed, spreading from him to me and leaving me filled with a hot, liquid desire. It was as if we’d already made love, and needed to do it again. And once more.

  I wondered if Professor Dr. Wolfgang K. Hauser could be siphoned off and bottled?

  “Ariel, you’re so beautiful,” he said, touching my hair with his fingertips and looking at me with those cloudy indigo eyes. “Even now, when you’re covered with cuts and stitches and bruises—a disastrous wreck—I want to do things with that sublime body of yours that I’ve never done with anyone.”

  “I think … I don’t think …” I blithered mindlessly. Lobotomized, no doubt, by an overdose of hormones. I tried to pull myself together enough to speak coherently. But Wolfgang put his fingertip to my lips.

  “No, let me go on. Yesterday, everything went wrong between us because I tried to rush into things when I ought not. I don’t want that with you. I admire you greatly, my dear; you’re very strong and brave. Do you know that your name was once an ancient name for Jerusalem, now the holy city of three religious faiths? In its oldest form, Ariel meant ‘lioness of God.’”

  “Lioness?” I said, regaining my real voice for the first time since that kiss. “That’s some reputation to live up to.”

  “So is ‘Wolf,’” he told me, again with a cryptic smile.

  “I get it—we’re both hunters,” I said, smiling back. “But I work solo, while your kind travel in packs.”

  He released the strand of my hair he’d been playing with and regarded me with a serious expression. “I’m not hunting you, my dear. Though you still don’t trust me. I’m here to help and protect you, nothing more. Any feelings I may have for you are my problem, not yours—and they shouldn’t interfere with the goals or mission of those who sent me here.”

  “You keep saying ‘those who sent you,’ but you never say who. And why hasn’t anyone told me anything about it?” I demanded with impatience. “Yesterday, you claimed you were my uncle Lafcadio’s friend, but he’s never mentioned your name to me. I think you should know I’ll be seeing him this weekend at Sun Valley. It won’t take much to learn the truth.”

  “I said an acquaintance, not a friend,” said Wolfgang Hauser, turning away with no expression. He looked at his hands. Then he stood up and looked down at me where I still sat in the rumpled bedclothes. “Have you finished?”

  “Not quite,” I said, warming to my theme. “How does it happen that everyone seems to have known I was getting that bloody inheritance in the first place—even before my cousin was dead?”

  “I’ll tell you the answer to everything, if you really want to know,” Wolfgang said quietly. “But first I must say I fear such knowledge can be very, very dangerous.”

  “Knowledge is never dangerous,” I told him, feeling my anger uncoiling. “Ignorance is dangerous. Especially ignorance of things that affect your own life. I’m sick of everyone hiding things from me, claiming it’s all for my own good! I’m sick of always being kept in the dark!”

  As I said it, I suddenly realized how much I meant it. It was, at the root of things, what was wrong with my whole life. It wasn’t just fear of the unknown, of a mysterious parcel—even if the contents of that parcel might get people killed. It was ignorance itself: it was never being able to ferret out the truth. It was this compulsion for secrecy, rife through my industry, dominating even my own family—the idea that nothing could ever be done openly, that everything required conspiracy and collusion.

  Thanks to Sam, I’d become a real master of this game. Thanks to Sam, I trusted no one on earth. Nor could anyone trust me.

  Wolfgang was watching me with a strange expression. My sudden, passionate outburst had surprised me too. Until now, I hadn’t realized how deeply these feelings had lain buried in me—or how quickly they could rise to the surface.

  “If that’s what’s re
quired to win your trust, then I’ll always tell you whatever you want to know, regardless of the danger to either of us,” he said, with what seemed great sincerity. “For it’s vital that you trust me completely even if you don’t like the answers. The person who sent me here is also the one who asked me to give you that manuscript of runes.” He motioned to my backpack sitting on the chair. “Although you have never met her, I suppose you will recognize the name. It’s your aunt: Zoe Behn.”

  I wondered about my compulsion to say “holy shit” all the time whenever anything startling or upsetting happened to me. I mean, what exactly is holy shit? Do gods or saints eliminate waste like the rest of us? And furthermore, was I so creatively bankrupt that I could think of no more imaginative exclamation to use, even within the privacy of my own mind?

  But in my business, as I said, it was a way of life to make up witty sayings about waste—probably because the chore of constant cleanup after an ever expanding and ever more wasteful population living on this ever shrinking planet was in itself a pretty mind-bogglingly depressing task to confront each and every day.

  So it was not unusual to be greeted, as I was by Olivier that morning when I came into the office, with a rousing round of the Tom Lehrer song “Pollution,” an industry favorite for phrases such as “The breakfast garbage that you throw into the Bay, they drink at lunch in San Jose.” Olivier was clicking his fingers like castanets as he spun around in his chair and caught sight of me.

  “Oh, my blessed prophet Moroni!” he cried. “You do look like something the argonaut dragged in, if you don’t mind my saying so. What happened to you? Did you crash into a lamppost in your zeal to run down pedestrians yesterday?”

  “I ran into an avalanche, in my zeal to get away from my life,” I told him, knowing that the pickup of Wolfgang’s government car would engender tongue-wagging around the site anyway, when it was learned that we’d been off together skiing all day. “And I’m sorry about what happened at the post office, Olivier. I’m just a bit crazy these days.”