Four Dominions

by Eric Van Lustbader

She sized Yeats up in a single knowing glance. “Oi, what’ll it be, then, gents?” she said in an exaggerated Cockney accent. Her wink directed at Conrad brought out a silent laugh. Mary so loved to puncture inflated balloons.

  But perhaps Yeats, brooding on internal matters, was oblivious to this byplay, for he answered Conrad instead. “As it happens, there’s a gathering this evening at midnight.”

  “Excellent.” Conrad rubbed his hands together. “That gives us plenty of time to eat our fill.”

  *

  THE SÉANCE was held in a nondescript town house in Belgravia that fronted on a beautiful square, now muzzy with a dank fog that, despite the men’s gloves and cloaks, crept into their bones. It was the kind of fog that left behind everything except for what was in the immediate vicinity; it was as if they had entered another country whose borders were impossible to discern.

  “The medium is Madame Garnet.” Keats pronounced it “Garnay,” in the French manner. “She is renowned on the Continent, and has now graced London with her presence.”

  No doubt fleeing the Parisian gendarmes by crossing the English Channel, Conrad thought. He despised charlatans of all stripes, not the least so-called mediums, manipulating people’s hopes and fears in order to make their “magic” come to life.

  The town-house interior looked to him like a Parisian whorehouse, with walls covered in aubergine flocked wallpaper, plush damask-covered settees, thick carpets to deaden sound, paintings of Pre-Raphaelite women in various stages of diaphanous dishabille. The lamps were lit low, the dim light casting vague shadows. Conrad and Yeats were led by a Berber servant, head wrapped in a traditional blue cloth shawl. An indigo tattoo ran from his lower lip down the center of his chin, where it spread out like a goatee. They followed him from the formal foyer, down a hall, and into a room that seemed to have once been a library but was now, it appeared, set up to entice the dead to rise from their graves.

  A round table, heavy and large, was covered with an enormous draped cloth, patterned in the symbols of the Tarot, which hung down to the black tufted carpet. There was no crystal ball, deck of Tarot cards, or Ouija board on the table, all the usual props of the bogus ritual. Nine high-back wooden chairs, their legs carved to resemble goats’ legs, their seats upholstered in black sateen, were ranged around the table at precise intervals. Heavy drapes took up half of one wall. In the opposite corner a rocking chair rested its ancient wooden bones. And speaking of bones, Conrad noted an assemblage of them in the center of the fireplace mantel where normally a clock or a lissome porcelain figurine would live. This anvil-like symbol of why everyone was here produced in him a cynical smile, while in all the others gathered for the séance it engendered a delicious shiver of anticipation, tinged with fear.

  There was a full house of eight guests. Besides Conrad and Yeats, six others, four woman and two men, stood rather nervously around the table. Conrad, at twenty, was the youngest by a matter of decades. Yeats, for instance, was in his mid-fifties. All were exceedingly well dressed, coiffed, and groomed. But of course Mme. Garnet would offer invitations only to the well-heeled of London’s populace.

  They were bidden to sit at the same time by the Berber. His skin was sheened as if with oil. Despite himself, Conrad was impressed. Whoever Mme. Garnet really was, she knew what she was about. The North African Berber made for an authentic prop.

  Mme. Garnet, when she finally made her appearance from behind a midnight-blue velvet curtain, was unlike any medium Conrad had met or read about. For one thing, she was young—younger than any spiritualist had any right to be. He judged her to have no more than twenty years. For another, she did not possess the typical charlatan’s supercilious air and fevered eyes. In fact, her eyes were colorless, dull as dishwater. As she was guided to her seat by the Berber, Conrad found himself wondering whether she was blind.

  But then she looked around the table at the gullible whom she had drawn to her stage set and studied each one with an intensity that belied her tender years. When it was his turn Conrad met her gaze with an intensity of his own, and though he had taken great pains to keep his expression neutral, Mme. Garnet said, “It seems we have a doubter in our midst tonight.”

  “On the contrary, madame,” Conrad said as all eyes swiveled in his direction. “I am open to anything.”

  At a signal from the medium the Berber backed away, extinguished the lights.

  Mme. Garnet did not ask the participants to hold hands. It was her voice that held them. Such a voice Conrad had not heard since he had been at the opera in Rome’s famed La Scala and heard the challenging “The Queen of the Night” aria from Mozart’s The Magic Flute so exquisitely sung it had brought tears to his eyes.

  Mme. Garnet did not speak so much as sing, an ululation that was not without melody and that sank into the bones of all who heard it, including Conrad. Once again, he was impressed; Mme. Garnet was a charlatan of the first rank. The air around the table appeared to stir, chilling their cheeks. A woman across from him gave an audible gasp. He imagined her clutching the cameo pinned to the bodice of her dress.

  “Please do not move,” Mme. Garnet sang so sweetly that it was impossible for Conrad to laugh at her. “There is someone here.” Conrad sensed her lift her arm. A cool fire illuminated her outstretched hand. The light emanated from the center of her cupped palm. As everyone watched, spellbound, the light unfurled like a flower in the light of an infernal moon. In the center of the light could be seen a human face. At this, the woman who had gasped gave out with a cry and promptly collapsed her upper body and head onto the table.

  A brief kind of confused bedlam broke out, at the end of which the so-called ectoplasm vanished from Mme. Garnet’s palm only to reappear in larger form in the rocking chair, which immediately began to creak as the creature on it apparently set it in motion.

  Cries and alarums rose everywhere in the room like burning incense.

  “Who are you?” she sang. “Please tell us your name.”

  But by this time Conrad had had enough. Standing, he produced a battery-powered torch, which he carried whenever he was out at night; there was no telling which unlit alleyways he would need to enter in his quest for clandestine information. Thumbing it on, he shone the beam onto whatever was in the rocking chair.

  “I expressly requested that no one was to move!” Mme. Garnet shouted, all semblance of her seductive singing voice gone. “Please retake your seat or the forces necessary for the séance will be shattered.”

  A cry stinking of fear arose from the assembled, backing her up, but Conrad continued to the rocking chair.

  “Here’s what’s shattered,” he said, over the uproar. He pulled the sheet off the dwarf sitting in the chair. He spun toward the table. “There is the ‘spirit,’ alive as any of us.”

  Those around the table, including Yeats, were transfixed. Before any of the clients could move a muscle, Conrad reached Mme. Garnet’s side. The Berber came out of the dark. This was to be expected; he was trained to protect his mistress. But Conrad spoke to him in Tamazight, his native language, and this arrested his movement as well as his intent. With his left hand, Conrad deftly removed the crumpled object from the medium’s décolletage. When he shone his light on it all could see that what had been passed off as ectoplasm was a stiff cloth on which had been pasted the face of a man cut out of a newspaper.

  *

  “SHE HAD an accomplice,” Conrad said.

  Yeats pursed his lips. “You mean the dwarf.” He still maintained the look of distaste that had come upon him when Conrad had unmasked the medium.

  “Besides the dwarf.” Conrad grinned.

  The two men strode through the wee hours of London’s industrial fogbound night. They passed drunkards and snatchpurses. Prostitutes beckoned from the mouths of shadowed alleyways.

  “The woman who appeared to faint.”

  “Mrs. Dunwhistle?” Yeats exclaimed. “But I know her! She’s part of our group.”

  “She may be part of your group,�
�� Conrad said, “but she was in Madame Garnet’s employ.”

  “I don’t believe it!”

  “She fainted at just the right time, didn’t she? Caused a ruckus, which was, in fact, a diversion, allowing Madame Garnet time to dispense with the cloth and for the dwarf to take his place on the rocking chair.”

  “This is most incredible,” Yeats declared. “And the African?”

  “A Berber from North Africa.”

  “For a moment there I was certain he would accost you. What did you say to him?”

  “I told him that working for a charlatan brought no honor to him or his family.”

  “And he listened.”

  “Berbers have an acute sense of honor.”

  “And I was taken in.” Yeats shook his head. “Well, old habits die hard, one supposes,” he offered, seeming to free himself from the distaste that had overtaken him at the sight of the foolishness that had taken him and the others in. “And how, pray tell, did this... charlatan”—he almost choked on the word—“manage to light up that cloth?”

  “Via a bioluminescent substance,” Conrad said.

  “What?”

  “The heat of her hand acted on the liquid in which the cloth was soaked, causing the glow.”

  Yeats appeared gobsmacked. “Something like that actually exists?”

  Conrad shrugged. “She most likely obtained it from the Berber. Several such substances exist in the High Atlas Mountains. They’re mainly harvested from a species of giant click beetle.”

  Yeats couldn’t get the sheer astonishment off his face. “We should go there.”

  “Mayhap next time,” Conrad said with a smile. “Our immediate destination lies elsewhere.”

  The great poet ran a trembling hand through his hair. “Ah, I espy yonder pub.” He pointed. “After this night I am in rather desperate need of a drink.” He considered a moment. “Or three.”

  6

  Malta: Present Day

  BRAVO WAS THIRTEEN, PUSHING GRANDFATHER CONRAD IN his wheelchair. It was a cold, clear day in December. He remembered the crows in the trees, lifting and cawing at their approach, pure black against the robin’s-egg-blue sky. Far off, over the hill, a dog was barking. The comforting drone of bees. Conrad’s white hair, still thick this close to death, spiked up like a crown of thorns.

  “It’s good to be away from London,” Conrad said. “At last.”

  “What d’you mean, ‘at last,’ Grandfather?”

  “Too many dark days, too many darker nights. Hellfire and brimstone is real enough, I’ll tell you that.”

  They pushed on toward the old apple tree, its gnarled trunk and branches brutalized by time. It was his grandfather’s favorite resting place on these excursions. When he died, he told his family, he wanted to be buried beneath the canopy of labyrinthine branches.

  Bravo saw that his grandfather’s fingers were twisting back and forth, that they held something between them. To his shock he saw that it was a crucifix. His father had already branded the old man a heretic, a man cut off from God. And yet he held a crucifix made, oddly, of bronze.

  “This—see how I cannot even say its name—has become my touchstone, my long and narrow pathway back to God. My one chance home.” Conrad held it up by its delicate chain so that the image of Christ swung back and forth from sunlight to shadow and back again. “But it also frightens me, Braverman. There are moments when it singes me, when I am certain that it will be the instrument of my death.” With a snapping gesture, he enclosed the crucifix in his fist. It trembled, as if with an ague that now would never leave him. “I have strayed so far, and fallen so very, very fast....”

  *

  BRAVO’S MIND flickered in and out of consciousness. When he fell back from the light it was always to join his grandfather under the old apple tree where Conrad was buried. In this translucent state, he heard Conrad’s voice like the soughing of the wind through the village of aged branches. The crisp scent of apples broken open on the ground, the raucous cries of the birds hopping gingerly toward the fallen fruit, feasting on its flesh. The sight of his grandfather’s pale eyes, the color of a lake in misty morning, peering into a place both faraway and inward.

  When, on occasion, he traveled upward out of the patchwork shadows of that tree, he was assaulted by an intense pain that had nevertheless become familiar, like an unannounced guest who would not leave even though he was systematically wrecking your home.

  Familiar or not, the pain was not Bravo’s friend. For the first four days of his slow and agonizing convalescence, he much preferred the company of his grandfather and the apple tree. In fact, for the first thirty-six hours, when his life hung in the balance, it was Conrad’s voice, as Bravo sat at his grandfather’s knee, staring at the shards of sky and cloud he glimpsed through the branches, that sustained him. Far away, past the painted sky, was a place he thought he knew, or used to know, but he seemed to have little interest in it.

  Once, early on, he sensed the ground beneath him softening like taffy, trying to suck him down into a blackness so complete it swallowed light whole. Conrad, seeing what was happening, threw out his arm, strong fingers grasping Bravo’s forearm, holding him. Bravo felt like a baby, weak and helpless. Conrad spoke in a language that sounded like a thunderclap. Bravo was lifted up, the ground solidified beneath him. From then on, it was only the excruciating pain he had to suffer.

  I can’t do anything about the pain, Conrad told him, much later. But even if I could, I wouldn’t. This is something you need to bear. This pain is your own. You need to enter it, let it pass through you. You need to know it so you will recognize it when the time comes.

  When the time comes for what? Bravo managed.

  A question he was asking himself. Conrad had gone, along with the comforting presence of the apple tree. Bravo lifted himself into the agony, and it was all he could do not to scream and keep screaming.

  *

  ON THE seventh day after the assault Bravo opened his eyes and squinted, sun dazzled. A mild breeze stirred his hair, but where it touched his skin a fire seized him in its grip and refused to let go.

  Elias stared down at him, frowning with an old man’s face. A week ago he had burst into blue-white flame that so terrified the witch—for that was how he thought of Emma—that she turned tail and ran. He had had an urge to run after her, to smother her in his strange fire that had no heat and did not consume him but flickered and popped off his flesh like a second skin or an aura. But then he saw what the witch had done to Bravo and knew if he left him he would surely die.

  So he stayed. He dragged Bravo’s insensate form out of the broiling sun, along a track he had made through the debris field caused by the collapse of the roof and the thick fire-eaten timbers. Through the vast central hall and the dining room, to the industrial-size kitchen, a corner of which he called home.

  He had fashioned a roof out of parachutes found in a stone structure beside the airfield, stitching them together with nylon thread. Originally a guardhouse, the structure was crammed with shelves of useful items a clever boy like Elias could use or turn into something helpful. The castle’s well system remained untouched by either fire or smoke; the electric stove sometimes worked, sometimes not. Three times a week Elias clambered down the cliffs to hook line-caught sea bream, red mullet, and, if he was lucky, branzino, his favorite.

  The former guardhouse also contained a field surgery kit. For Bravo, he had need of every item in there, from rolls of gauze, to antiseptic, to needles, sutures, and an array of antibiotics. His father had been a soldier; he knew what to do. The gleaming long-nosed tweezers meant, he supposed, to root out bullets, which he employed to peel back leaves of ruined skin, cutting them off with a pair of surgical scissors. He worked diligently to clean Bravo’s lips, nose, cheeks—the areas that had been split open by the ferocious beating—then sutured the rips in his flesh. He felt around the bruises and swellings of Bravo’s ribs and shoulder, then carefully bound the rib cage. He wished he had i
ce for the swellings.

  There was a moment, early on, when it seemed to Elias that his patient had stopped breathing. Bending close, he listened for the shallow, rattling breath that had been coming from between Bravo’s half-open lips. When he could not hear even a whisper, he slapped Bravo’s cheek as hard as he could, because he couldn’t think what else to do and he had to do something. Eventually, owing to the slap or something else, Bravo started breathing again.

  Elias ate his meals by Bravo’s side. When Bravo began to run a fever, Elias managed to get him to swallow some antibiotic tablets. To do this, he had to grind up the tabs, lift his patient’s head slightly so he wouldn’t choke, dribble the antibiotic water between his cracked and swollen lips. Instinct, and memories of talks with his father, warned him not to let Bravo get dehydrated, which would slow the healing and might even prove lethal. Twice a day he bathed Bravo in salt water, both to cool him and to help with healing.

  Within three days he ran out of fresh fish and had to raid his store of fish he had dried and salted. He was afraid to leave his patient to go catch more fresh fish, which typically took hours. He cut down on his portions, which in any case weren’t large. He wished he could feed some to his patient, who frighteningly was still unconscious. He slept shallowly, like a mother with her gravely ill child, coming fitfully awake with every movement or sound Bravo made.

  In the lulls between, Elias spoke to Bravo as if he were conscious, as if they were two friends sitting around a fire, trading stories of their past disguised as tall tales.

  “I was born in a crossfire hurricane,” Elias said one night after his dinner. “I mean that literally. Later, when I was older, my father told me the story of the raid, the automatic fire that crisscrossed the perimeter of the castle grounds. At the height of the firefight, just as my father led a squad of men that eventually beat back the attack, I escaped my howling mother’s womb, along with more than half her blood. An artery ruptured on my way out. Our house was well beyond the perimeter, of course; families of Knights were not allowed anywhere near the castle. When my father was angry with me he’d say it was my fault, that I killed her in order to live.”