Spellbinders Collection

by Molly Cochran

  She touched a thin pine splinter to the flame of her lamp and used it to light three other lamps already sitting in natural hollows of the stone. The flames glinted from the flowing surface of a pool, water so clear to the point you could barely tell the edge. Straight up from the pool, a patch of basalt made black contrast to the pink granite and a quartz vein split the basalt to a white mound spouting crystal water. The rounded creases of the stone to either side were very . . . feminine.

  God, the "boys" on Kate's crew would die if they ever saw where their drinking water came from.

  Now that her eyes had adjusted to the darkness, Alice could see the beams and floorboards looming overhead, black with centuries of smoke. Someday she'd have to get Kate down here, to check for rot and make repairs — even cedar and chestnut wouldn't last forever. Those stairs seemed to creak more every year.

  She puttered through the routine Aunt Jean had taught, checking that the overflow still led water from the pool out through a natural cleft in the stone, to the basin in the other cellar that everyone else thought was the real spring. Checking the airflow in through fieldstone foundations to the flue in the old stone chimney, making sure the air stayed clean and dry. Making a mental note that she should bring fresh sweetgrass and sage for the herb bundles hanging from the beams. Routine was safe, and calming.

  Then the hair started to prickle on the back of her neck and along her arms. The spring had noticed her. Time to swallow her heart and get to work.

  She dipped water from the pool and washed her face, breaking the mirror into a hundred ripples of flashing lamp-flame. Cold on her hands, the water bit her face like fire and left a tingle of power behind. Purified, she gathered shavings of cedar and sticks of fine-split apple wood from small hollows in the stone, laying a tiny fire at the base of the stone chimney. Small as she was, even her hands could span the blaze and snuff it out. It was enough.

  "Stone of the sun, water of the sky, air of the sea, I ask you to bless this house."

  Fine tendrils of smoke rose up, aromatic, and seemed to defy the draft by seeking out each corner of the hidden cellar. The sense of power increased, as if Alice had woken something deeper than the spring.

  The flames glowed green and orange, from trace minerals or from spirits dancing on the blackened wood. She added sweetgrass and studied the glowing tangles of ash it left behind; she added sage and watched each leaf dissolve into a skeleton of fiery veins. Fire wove its hypnotic spell.

  "Stone of the sun, water of the sky, air of the sea, evil has come into our land." She felt the slimy touch of the gaze behind that black-tinted glass, the weight and pull of the deadly power riding in the dark car. She fed her memories into the flames, watching them flare into cleansing smoke.

  The pencil-thin sticks had burned down to a red glow, waiting. Alice took out the tobacco pouch and emptied it into her right hand.

  "Wind of the west, I call to you. Watch over my friend." She scattered a pinch of tobacco into the coals. The glow sent blue smoke spiraling up, straight to the chimney flue and into the sky.

  "Wind of the east, I call to you. Watch over my friend." A second pinch of tobacco followed the first.

  Aunt Jean had made her stand outside in the cold, one January evening, watching the thin tendrils of smoke rise up from the chimney. Each puff had trailed off to its compass point, defying the icy northwest wind and logic.

  "Wind of the south, I call to you. Watch over my friend." A third pinch. "Wind of the north, I call to you. Watch over my friend." A fourth.

  She poured the remaining tobacco from the palm of her right hand. It cascaded into the coals in a shower of sparks.

  "Spirits of the earth, spirits of the water, spirits of the sky, I send smoke to you. I send sweet smoke to you. Guard this land. Guard the people of this land. Guard the giver of this gift. Guard us against evil. Make the sun shine into darkness, make the wind sweep the air clean, make the waters wash away the stains that lie on the land. Guard us against evil."

  The smoke closed around her, tight and suffocating. Her heart thudded in her chest, and she felt the whole weight of the house pressing down on her shoulders. Power tugged at her and tested her, prodding for lies.

  Those New Age kiddies with their lilac-tinted Wicca nattered about threefold payback if you worked evil with your power. As if power would do something it didn't want to do. Alice gasped for air and felt sweat pouring down her back. The powers of this spring guarded their strength carefully. She pushed the limits by protecting Kate. If they thought she was being selfish, protecting her lover rather than the community . . . .

  The vise around her chest backed off, and she could breathe again. She hadn't crossed the line.

  As always, the fire had burned to ash, and the ashes were cold. She never knew if that meant the heat had been sucked out by the power, or that she'd waited somewhere outside of time while she was tested and entropy did its thing.

  She stretched the tension out of her shoulders, and washed sweat from her face. The water felt like water now, cold from the earth, not liquid flame.

  There were other things that needed doing, safer things. She gathered ashes from the fire, a small stone from the pool, herbs, the breast-feather of an eagle, a bone whistle the length of a child's finger, and put them in the empty tobacco bag. She plucked a hair from her head, wrapped it into a circle, and added it. The bag now carried all her magic bound to power from the spring. If she could get Kate to carry it, it would stand guard. Or maybe Alice could tuck it under the seat of the truck.

  She touched ash to her wet forehead and cheeks, marking them with straight dark lines. She swept the small hearth with a wild turkey's wing, gathering the remains of her fire into a small pouch sewn from birch-bark. The house and the spring demanded neatness.

  She blew out all the lamps except the one she'd brought, and topped up the ones that needed it from oil kept in the cellar to absorb the power. And then she climbed back up the stairs, and let the trapdoor thump back into place, and breathed a sigh of relief. She was still alive.

  Always put the cat out, before going down to the spring. Then she won't starve if you don't come back.

  Her shirt stuck to her back and belly, and she could smell her fear in the sweat. She slid the dead bat into the birch-bark pouch, blew out the lamp, and headed back through the centuries for a hot bath and a good stiff shot of whiskey.

  Chapter Four

  Gary stared down at the slab of pink granite set into the spring-lush sod by his feet. The stone stared back at him. "In Memoriam," it said, in fresh-cut letters as sharp as a knife. "Daniel L. Morgan," it said. "1964 - 2004," it said. It didn't bother with months and days.

  It didn't mention that June 7, 2004 had been the day before Gary's graduation. It didn't mention that Gary had walked down the aisle in the Stonefort Consolidated High School gym the next evening, not knowing whether his father was alive or dead.

  There'd been TV reporters sticking microphones into red-eyed faces, the whole instant-news thing of pathos or bathos or whatever the proper term was, the class valedictorian bravely carrying on while the search continued for his missing father. More at eleven. He'd come within an inch of breaking one reporter's arms, shoving a camera up another's nose. It would have been so easy, with the things he'd learned in the dojo.

  Then a switch had clicked somewhere in his emotions, and he'd detached from the whole scene. The switch was still off at the breaker box, power disconnected. That detachment had carried him through today's swarm of mourners and relatives, the endless line of faces of people that should have been important to him. They weren't.

  "Lost At Sea," the stone added. There were a lot of those scattered in the neatly-mown grass on Morgan's Point: stones without the gentle mounding of dirt filled back in over a coffin, or the ancient graves with a slight hollow where the soil had settled down into the space left when coffin and body had rotted to dust. Stones remembered storms and reefs and boats that simply vanished. On some of the older one
s, "Lost At Sea" was all you could still read.

  The stone next to Dad's echoed it. "Benjamin S. Morgan, 1961 - 1984." The lines bracketing the name and date were identical: another memorial, to another Morgan lost at sea.

  People were scattering now, drifting slowly back to the house, back to coffee, sandwiches, and quiet condolences. Gary thought he probably should join them, show how he was able to act like the man of the family now. He didn't want to. He wanted to stand out on the end of the point and scream hatred at the sea.

  The sea was a thief.

  Gary shoved his hands into the pockets of his windbreaker. The wind was cold off the water, damp with offshore fog, and it stank of rotting seaweed. It stank like a grave.

  His jaw clenched, and he stalked across the grass until he reached the tip of Morgan's Point, the strip of salt-burned grass right above the surf. He stood in the shadow of the stone tower and tried to make tears come. He couldn't cry. He was too angry. Nobody had ever told him that grief was rage.

  Words choked his throat. He stared down at the cold gray indifferent swells rolling in under cold gray fog. He wanted to scream at the sea, curses and blasphemies, and then his father's voice whispered out of the damp wind, words from Gary's first morning as stern man on Dad's lobster boat.

  "Never curse the sea, Gary. Never curse the wind. You'll only hurt yourself. The sea made us — made the Morgans, made Stonefort. Without the wind and sea, we wouldn't even be here. Remember that. Whatever the sea takes from you, it's worth the price."

  His father's voice stole the rage from Gary and left grief behind. His knees folded under him, and he slumped down to sit on cold stone and stare out at the endless rows of wave after wave after wave flowing in from the fog to hump up and smash against the rock. They blurred as if the fog was condensing in his eyes, and he finally wept. The foghorn out on Tern Rock moaned in sympathy.

  The fog slipped in to blanket the point, creeping across waves and rocks and up the cliff to turn the world gray. Gary waited, searching for the courage to go back to the house, back to his mother and his sisters and the quiet swarm of cousins. A hand fell lightly on his shoulder. "He was a good man."

  Gary jerked with shock and looked up into a face that was vaguely familiar — a man, older than Dad, with the slim build, gray eyes, and sharp nose of the Morgans. One of the cousins, then, but the older generation. Gary couldn't put a name to him.

  "That's another Daniel Morgan you're sitting on, son. Daniel John, 'Old Daniel' they called him. Commanded a sloop under Saltonstall in the revolution, had to burn it when the whole fleet retreated up the river from Castine and got trapped. Never forgave that idiot from Boston, swore he'd get the value of his ship back by fair means or foul." The man chuckled. "He did, too."

  Gary looked down at the stone. It was marble, not granite, and the salt air and the centuries had eaten the carved words into gibberish. Whoever this stranger was, he knew the family history.

  Then Gary blinked with shock. The tower loomed dark in the fog behind the man, and its door stood open. All he could see from here was a black hollow and stone walls at least six feet thick. But he'd never even seen that much before, never been inside the heavy iron-studded oak door that didn't show a lock or latch.

  "Too dangerous," Dad had always said. "The old dump is falling down." Gary had climbed the walls once, fifty feet straight up, when both Mom and Dad were gone for the day. At least the roof was solid — solid enough to hold four bronze cannon in black iron carriages. He'd found another door up there, set into the battlements, again solid oak without a latch and just as immovable. With that taste to sweeten the mystery, Gary had pestered Dad a dozen times, a hundred times, but the answer had always been the same.

  Another figure formed in the mists, turned into Mom, and then stalked forward radiating anger at the stranger. "You bastard! You dare to show up now!" She made one of those Italian gestures she'd learned from her quarryman grandfather, the uppercut fist and hand slapping biceps that nobody would ever translate for Gary. The meaning was pretty clear, though. Then she emphasized it by spitting on the ground between them.

  "Maria . . ."

  "Crawl back under your rock and leave my son alone!"

  "He's Dan's son, too."

  Gary blinked at the name as much as at the sudden storm of rage. After all, that was Mom, Melodrama Incorporated. But nobody ever called Gary's father "Dan." It was always "Daniel," even from close family friends.

  "Damn you, the boy is only seventeen! Leave him be!"

  Gary stood up, trying to force his mother and this stranger to talk to him rather than over him. His mother vetoed that by pushing him back down to sit on the headstone. When she was mad, she gained about a foot in height and fifty pounds of muscle.

  The stranger shook his head. "He's almost eighteen, and he needs to know before he goes off to college. You know Dan was going to do it this weekend. Now he can't."

  Gary's mother bit her thumb at the man. "Screw you and all the Morgans and all the ships you rode in on! Choose someone else!"

  Gary stared at his mother in shock. She'd always had an explosive temper, but she never used language like that. He tried to stand up again, and again she forced him down with her hand on his shoulder. It felt like the tower itself sitting on him.

  The stranger shook his head again. "You know it doesn't work like that. I didn't chose Gary. Dan didn't choose him. The Dragon makes the choice."

  "You can take that Dragon and shove it where the sun don't shine! If anything happens to my child, I swear I'll kill you!"

  "Maria, you know I wouldn't do this if there was any other way. He has to know."

  Gary's mother spat again and muttered something in Italian. Then she shot the horned fist at the man and stalked back into the fog. The stranger stared after her, a peculiar mixture of humor and pain twisting his face.

  Mom wasn't holding him down anymore, but the shock kept Gary glued to the tombstone. "What was that all about?"

  "That was something from before you were born. She's never forgiven me. Probably never will."

  The tone grabbed Gary's attention, and he studied the man again. He had the family's dark brown hair, graying at the temples, and Dad's jaw as well. Definitely one of Dad's cousins, then, and he must have grown up in Stonefort if he knew both Dad and Mom before they were married. But Gary still couldn't come up with a name.

  "I'm sorry; there are just too many people around today. Who are you?"

  "I'm Odysseus, boy. I'm the wandering old sailor returned from looting Troy. I'm battle-scarred and gray-bearded and full of sneaky plans. You've wanted to see the inside of that thing?" He grinned, showing gold caps where two side teeth had been broken, and waved at the door of the tower.

  He hadn't answered the question. Still, Gary found himself trusting the man. For all Mom's venom, she had gone off and left the two of them alone. But God, she was acting weird. Weren't widows supposed to cry? All she did was throw things and yell at people over the phone.

  "Dad said it was dangerous."

  "So 'tis, boy. The fruit of the Tree of Knowledge is always dangerous. You go in there, you'll never be the same again. The Dragon might eat you." He mimed crocodile jaws with his hands, and backed them with an expression of mock horror.

  The hair prickled on Gary's neck. Dad had been like that, over-the-edge comedy at times that drove Mom up the wall. Then he'd start to cackle like a madman and juggle stuff grabbed up from Mom's collection of Venetian glass. Dad's hands were quick like lightning, always snatching the delicate glassware back from the edge of disaster.

  "Myths don't eat people."

  "Myths?" The man threw a pose of injured dignity. "There's a real dragon under that tower, boy. Been there for centuries, just lying in wait for innocents like you. Every generation, some young fool comes along and pokes at it. If it wakes up grumpy, it eats you. Butter it up nice, and you walk away with all the gold and rubies you can carry. Want to take a chance?"

  Gary shook his
head in disbelief. Dragons. Gold. Rubies. Bullshit. He did want to see the inside of the tower, though. "What's this Tree of Knowledge bit?"

  "Oh, that's the Dragon's specialty. It tells you things. Things about yourself, things about the Morgans. Confucius say, 'Self-knowledge is greatest treasure.'"

  He'd switched to a singsong parody of a Charlie Chan movie for the last bit. Then he swung into the spiel of a sideshow barker. "Great Dragon sees all, knows all, tells all. Learn your fate and fortune, just ten cents. One thin dime, one tenth of a dollar! Step right up, ladies and gentlemen."

  Again the stranger sounded just like Dad. Stuff like that drove Mom crazy, but Dad would only laugh. Said if she didn't shut up, he'd run off some day and join the circus. Gary's eyes stung with new tears. He swallowed the chuckle that had been bubbling up his throat.

  "Does your Dragon know what happened to my father?"

  The man sobered and stared deep into Gary's eyes. "Yes it does, boy. You can go in there and learn, or you can go back to the house. Just one thing before you choose: Once you go in, you can't back out."

  He paused, making sure Gary knew this wasn't the clown speaking. His mannerisms were so much like Dad's the resemblance was eerie. "It's a one-way trip, boy, and you can die taking it. Dan didn't think you would. But it's possible. That's what has your mother spooked. If she wasn't so damned mad, she'd have hugged you and cried before she let you try it."

  Gary stared at that arched stone opening into darkness and mystery. The tower called to him. A shiver ran down his spine and tingled in his fingers. The strange man faded from his thoughts. Gary stood up, slowly, as if he was stalking a wild animal and didn't want to startle it. If he moved too suddenly, the door might jerk closed before he got there. Then he'd never learn the secrets, never find his father.

  But his father was dead.