The Magic Circle

by Katherine Neville

  There on the opposite bank, at the forest’s edge, were the two very last people on earth I wanted to see: my boss Pastor Owen Dart, and Herr Professor Dr. Wolfgang K. Hauser of Krems, Österreich. Wolfgang was holding Olivier with a gun at his throat. Dark Bear, only yards away, had been firmly lashed to a tree.

  How did they get here, a hundred miles into the wilderness? Then I realized that in the few minutes, back at the house, when Dark Bear had stepped inside, we’d left the cars unattended. Those few moments might have been all the time required to attach tracking devices to our vehicles. It seems Wolfgang had learned from his experience the last time he’d tailed me.

  Even at this distance, I could see Wolfgang’s deep turquoise eyes riveted on the three of us out across the river—first resting briefly on Bambi and me, then burning like horrible coals into Sam, as if he couldn’t believe what he saw.

  I wanted to weep. But my more immediate desire was to stay alive, a prospect that didn’t seem too awfully promising just at this moment. I suddenly noticed that the Pod held a hunting knife in his hand. Now he set his other hand firmly on the thick line of rope that was tied to the tree just beside him—the rope we were all clinging to, our total life support system out here in the rapid waters. A twinge of fear ran up my spine as I realized he was about to hack it in two! But then I saw Wolfgang shake his head and speak a few quick words to the Pod, who removed his hand from our lifeline with a nod of agreement, and glanced back at us.

  Bambi and Sam and I stood there in midriver, frozen like statues, as I prayed that maybe Wolfgang had had a change of heart, maybe he’d undergone radical personality surgery in the few hours since I’d seen him. After all, I tried to reason, if their objective was to destroy all trace of these documents, leaving their team with the copy Sam himself had made as the only version in existence, then there was no reason why the Pod shouldn’t cut us all loose like bait and toss us over the falls to feed the fish.

  But of course there was a reason, and it wasn’t long before I grasped it. If we went over the falls right now, Pandora’s manuscripts would, too—but they wouldn’t be destroyed if they floated! Dozens of ancient messages bobbing in modern little bottles, running the Salmon River hundreds of miles, to the Snake and the Columbia and out to sea. Scattered in such a manner, how could anyone ever begin to collect and destroy them all before others could find them? These messages and their bottles had to be captured or destroyed first, before destroying the messengers.

  Just then, Sam motioned behind his back for Bambi and me to move closer. When we’d closed ranks, Sam glanced over his shoulder at me—and he winked! What in God’s name was that supposed to mean?

  About thirty paces ahead, Wolfgang was wading down into the water in his shoes and stockings, without bothering to roll his pants. He held Olivier in front of him, gun to his head, as a shield. The Pod followed just behind, holding a gun in one hand, his knife in the other. I had to hand it to Wolfgang: he must be well acquainted with his kid sister Bettina’s flair with a pistol, and was taking no chances. But I couldn’t help being depressed over Olivier, and not only because I liked him. If we three did try to jump the others, whom we outnumbered by two to one, it might cost Olivier’s life, since he couldn’t swim.

  Though it was hard to be cheery in such circumstances, I tried to focus on what Sam might have meant by that wink. It was clear there was something up his sleeve. Knowing Sam, I knew the moment he decided to act we’d all have to think on our feet and take quick action too. But when it happened, it wasn’t what I would have thought of.

  Wolfgang and the Pod moved cautiously along the rope, on the upstream side, as we were, using it as a buffer—which would soon prove their big mistake. I could witness their progress by craning left, as Bambi just behind Sam leaned right for a better view.

  When they reached midstream, Wolfgang, still with a throttlehold on Olivier, stepped aside from the rope in the rushing waters so the Pod could get past to reach Sam. As Wolfgang moved slightly upstream, holding the white and sick-looking Olivier at gunpoint, Dart inched forward toward Sam’s load of cylinders, still foolishly wielding his knife and gun.

  Then casually, almost as if providing assistance to the Pod, Sam lightly flirted the rope that secured his tight parcel of tubes to his back—and before anyone grasped what he was about to do, he’d spilled the buntline hitch and snapped his securing rope free. The haul of hollow lucite tubes started to slip swiftly downstream, headed for the falls.

  If memory serves, it was just about then that all hell broke loose.

  Pastor Dart dropped his knife in the water and lurched forward across the waist-level rope to grab at the iceberg floating away. But at that instant, Sam shoved the rope deep into the water so the Pod, expecting it higher, lost his balance and flipped forward on his face into the ever rushing waters. Then Sam yanked the rope back up with a snap so it snagged the Pod, hanging him up like a bundle of wet laundry.

  As the Pod floundered trying to get off the rope, Wolfgang shoved Olivier to one side for a clean shot at the swiftly retreating mass before it went over the side. But just as he did, an angry black bundle of fur, too long restrained in Olivier’s backpack, exploded right in Wolfgang’s face! I never knew Jason had that many claws, or could deploy them with such rapid-fire, razor-sharp precision.

  When Wolfgang threw up his arms to cover his face, Jason track-cleated over them, then over his head, and disappeared behind him. Wolfgang’s gun flew into midair—thanks to a fast-acting Browning and a very resourceful Bambi. Wolfgang screamed curses over the rush of falls, but it didn’t stop him. Holding his bleeding hand, he leapt over the heavy rope to tear after the disappearing mass of tubes, just as Sam barreled into him sideways and they went down together. I glanced around fast, trying to reconnoiter for Olivier—but he’d vanished as swiftly as my cat:

  All this happened in seconds. I finally wrestled free my own incapacitating pack of tubes and quickly lashed them to the strong, thick rope to secure them. Then I grabbed the Pod, whose gun had vanished, too, as he was pulling himself upright in the churning waters. As Bambi covered him with her weapon, I stripped off his necktie and tied him tightly by his wrists to the hefty rope, alongside the pack.

  Bambi was pulling free her own pack as I climbed across the rope and moved toward Wolfgang and Sam, still churning together in the water. Over my shoulder, Bambi let out a piercing scream. I whipped around to follow her gaze, and I saw Olivier’s body, partly submerged and thrashing but well downstream of us—maybe sixty feet—headed straight for the falls.

  I was trying to figure out what in God’s name to do, when just up ahead I saw Wolfgang drag Sam from the water, slug him hard in the jaw, drop him back in the drink again, and plunge off on foot toward the swiftly vanishing object of his desire.

  Sam clambered upright, took one look downstream, and caught sight of Olivier. Before I had time to think, he’d dived into the same fast water that was swiftly dragging Olivier toward the falls. Some distance beyond him, Wolfgang—still on his feet and nearly within reach of the iceberg—made a grab for it, missed, lost balance. He went down, and the water grabbed him too.

  Bambi had managed to get her pack off and lashed down, while keeping her powder dry. Still holding the gun, she picked her way the short distance to where I stood, a few yards downstream beyond the rope, and she hollered in my ear:

  “My God! Can’t we do something? They will all be killed!”

  I had to admit it sure looked that way. Nor for the life of me could I imagine what might prevent it. Even if I could get to one end of the heavy rope stretched across the river and free it to toss as a lifeline, I was sure it wouldn’t be long enough to reach that far downstream. We watched in horror as the ghastly scene unfolded before us: three men and a crystal iceberg all drawn by the dark, glassy waters inexorably toward the cliff. I couldn’t breathe.

  Bambi shifted her gun to her right hand, her cellist’s bowing hand, and took mine in her left as we saw the pile o
f crystalline tubes containing Pandora’s deadly manuscripts moving in slow motion to the brink of the abyss, where they twisted gracefully once, like a ballet dancer, then slipped silently over the edge. A moment later, Wolfgang’s dark head followed just as silently after.

  We saw Sam, with swift strokes, catch up to Olivier’s possibly already lifeless body—too late for either of them to be extricated from the terrible undertow. Bambi and I, with the water’s roar in our ears, watched in silence as we saw the rest of our generation, except us two, slip swiftly over the edge of the abyss into oblivion.

  As I stood there in those cold, rushing waters I had no tears, either of forgiveness or remorse. I felt nothing at all for those who’d created or perpetuated this swamp of treachery—most of whom, as it turned out, were members of my own horrid family. But I did have something I still clung to, as I’d clung to that lifeline of rope, something that might keep me alive in the face of such overwhelming odds. It was the one thing that remained at the bottom of Pandora’s box when all else had flown the coop: that thing called hope.

  I turned to leave the river, but Bambi was clutching my hand.

  “What shall we do now?” she asked over the sound of the rushing waters—the waters I had just watched carry away everything I’d ever cared for in my life.

  “The first thing we have to do,” I told her just as loudly, “is to find my cat!”

  Bambi tied our cylinders together and floated them back to the shore, while I dragged the body of the dreadful Pod on his back through the waters and deposited him unceremoniously on the riverbank. She held the gun on him as I went to untie Sam’s grandfather Dark Bear, who helped us lash Pastor Dart to the tree in his place: tit for tat, asshole. Then the three of us hiked downstream to hunt for Jason.

  I’ll never understand exactly how I knew Jason was the key to the solution, or that he might still be alive and afloat. But I knew Jason’s psyche as well as one could grasp the psyche of a cat. His natural instincts, naturally, were those of the mythological hero he was named for: he took like an argonaut to water.

  Even if he’d never before gone over a waterfall the height and breadth of this one—maybe forty feet high by a hundred feet wide—still, you couldn’t keep him out of the water chute rides at amusement parks that were higher than that, and he was well used to swimming in fast water along the Snake. The water below the falls here would be slower and far more tranquil, so if Jason had indeed made the drop without breaking any bones, I was pretty sure we’d find him down there alive.

  And Jason loved retrieving things, whether a rubber ball in the stream or a yellow post office slip in the snow. So why not locate an iceberg of lucite tubes containing valuable manuscripts? Not to mention the bodies of Olivier, Sam, or Wolfgang, whether dead or alive.

  We found Jason first, “happy as a clam at high tide,” as Olivier might say, paddling in a calm pool just below the falls. The object he was paddling around with a certain pride was the floating pile of plastic tubes, their rope snagged on a rock. A few tubes had broken loose and were floating nearby in the pool looking little the worse for wear.

  Since Bambi and I were already soaked to the skin, we climbed down the bank to the pool and pulled them out—along with Jason—while Dark Bear went on along the riverbank as far as he found it still passable on foot. By the time we’d hauled the cylinders up to a ledge, he had returned.

  “I could go no farther—the bank drops off in the underbrush,” he told me. “But I’ve spotted them from above. They’re downstream not far from here. I saw three heads, all floating in a small inlet that projects slightly from the river.”

  “Alive?” I asked him.

  “I believe so,” said Dark Bear. “But the walls are sheer and slick. We can’t get them out that way. They must be brought back up here by way of the water.”

  The dropoff to the river was steeper here, the water far deeper than above. Though Dark Bear, Bambi, and I were all pretty strong swimmers, we still tied a few loose containers around each of our chests as flotation devices. She hid her gun in a bush. Then, one by one, we slipped into the dark river.

  We found them less than a mile downstream, and were in for quite a surprise. Sam, treading water, was supporting not Olivier but Wolfgang, whose eyes were shut. Sam was holding him under the chin in a lifeguard’s grip while Olivier was bobbing around nearby, cheerful as a Hallowe’en apple in a tub!

  “Men overboard!” Olivier cried when he spied our swimming flotilla’s approach. “And women and natives to the rescue!”

  When we reached Olivier, I said, “Thank God you’re all alive—but I thought you couldn’t swim!”

  “So did I!” he said. “Your backpack saved me. It kept me afloat, though I got swept over the falls. Pretty scary! Then I bobbed up like a soap bubble as soon as I landed.”

  Of course! My huge plastic bottle that I always carried for hiking, to filter water. Filled with air, it had saved Olivier’s life.

  “Are you all right, too?” I asked Sam with enormous concern.

  He looked awfully ragged—but not as bad as Wolfgang, who must have lost plenty of blood, what with his cat-clawed face and Bambi-wounded hand.

  “I’m pretty sure he broke his leg in the fall,” Sam told us, still treading water. “He must have passed out from the pain.”

  “So. We will take him ourselves,” said Bambi. “For we must swim back.”

  She helped Dark Bear take Wolfgang from Sam as I showed Olivier how to propel his now-floating self back up through the milder current beneath the falls. When we’d crawled up the bank, Dark Bear lifted the lifeless Wolfgang in his arms and we picked our way back to retrieve the Pod and the other vessels. Olivier, carrying Jason while holding Bambi’s gun trained on the Pod, marched our soon-to-be-former boss before us back to the car, as Sam, Bambi, and I carried our ever more costly treasures.

  A muddy, bedraggled Sam crawled into the front seat of the Land Rover beside me, and Dark Bear drove, with Olivier, Bambi, the cylinders, and our hostages in the roomy back. I was completely exhausted. Despite all the lifeblood I’d invested in these manuscripts, I almost wished they’d actually vanished beneath the glassy but dangerous surface of the river. My imagination was so demolished by all that had happened that I couldn’t think beyond the end of my nose.

  “What next?” I asked the ensemble, who seemed as battered and confused as I.

  “I can tell you,” said Olivier, “that my first steps are going to be to throw all my nuclear security badges in the nearest mailbox, pull out a few of my other badges, and use them to haul these two chaps to the authorities for attempted mass murder.” He paused and added, “We’ll discuss all the other charges after that.”

  “And for me,” Bambi said proudly, “as we were walking down here from the river, Dark Bear asked that Lafcadio and I use our many contacts to help select the best archaeological and academic institutions in other parts of the world to review and authenticate the original documents. I know we will be pleased to do it. As for my brother, as Lafcadio says, he has planted during all his life what he will shortly harvest.”

  I myself really wasn’t yet prepared to think about the unconscious Wolfgang, lying waterlogged beside a dripping Pod on the backseat.

  “But these manuscripts aren’t quite out of the woods yet,” said Sam. “Not until we’ve rounded up a few more people—including your father, and Bettina’s mother—who’d surely still leave no stone unturned to put their hands on them.” Despite my feelings toward my unrepentant father, I felt an understandable pang at how things had turned out, and I could tell from her face Bambi must feel the same. “But until we get all the culprits put out of commission,” Sam added, “it will be my continuing job to protect and decipher these documents.”

  As for me, I had no idea where I went from here. I couldn’t help wondering what life would be like after these past weeks, when everything had altered so irrevocably. I had no real job, no newfound friends, no mission, and no danger.

/>   “I haven’t a clue what I’m supposed to do,” I admitted to everyone in general.

  “Oh, you’re about to have the biggest job of all,” said Sam with a muddy grin, as I sat there waiting for the other moccasin to drop.

  “You’re going to learn to dance,” he said.

  THE DANCE

  Mandala means “circle,” more especially a magic circle.… I have come across cases of women who did not draw mandalas but danced them instead. In India [this has] a special name.… mandala nrithya, the mandala dance.

  —Carl G. Jung

  In the ecstasy of dance man bridges the chasm between this and the other world.… We may assume that the circle dance was already a permanent possession of the Paleolithic culture, the first perceptible stage of human civilization.

  —Curt Sachs, World History of the Dance

  The oldest dance form seems to be the Reigen, or circle dance [which] really symbolizes a most important reality in the life of primitive men—the sacred realm, the magic circle.… In the magic circle, all daemonic powers are loosed.

  —Susanne K. Langer, Feeling and Form

  So we’d come full circle—but my dancing days hadn’t quite begun. Olivier arranged, by pay phone from the road, that the Feds send a deputation from Boise to rendezvous with us back in town, pick up the Pod and Wolfgang, and put them on ice. The goods he had on them—including treason, international espionage, fraternizing with known foreign arms dealers and nuclear smugglers, attempted multiple homicides in a river, and the assassination of the high-level government operative Theron Vane—seemed pale, in my perception, compared with what Wolfgang had done: the attempted murder of his own half brother, Sam.