Spellbinders Collection

by Molly Cochran

  He pointed to an armchair covered by an old mustard-colored throw in the corner. "Stroke, the doctor said, very peaceful. She still had the book she was reading in her lap. The Valley of the Dolls, it was."

  He came around slowly and sat beside Arthur. "Well, to make a long story short, about three months later I was visiting my sister and her family in the city. We ate a good meal, we played cards. By the time I left, it was after eleven o'clock. My sister says it's freezing, Milton, take a taxi. I say are you crazy, a cab to Riverside? I'll take the train, I says.

  "So I walk to the El stop. Almost as soon as I leave the house, I find a paperback book on the sidewalk. There's nobody around, it's late, I think maybe I'll read something on the train, so I pick it up. As God is my witness, it's The Valley of the Dolls."

  He held his hand up solemnly. "Now, Arthur, I am a Jew. Jews do not believe in ghosts. When a person dies, that's it. This is what our religion teaches. But holding that book in my hand, I knew it was Ethel trying to give me a message. We were married forty-one years. We never talked. You know why?"

  Arthur shook his head.

  "Because we didn't have to. That woman knew what I was going to say before I said it. I'd think, it's cold, a little macaroni and cheese might be nice, and the next thing out of her mouth would be, 'Do you want fish or chicken with your macaroni and cheese?' Are you getting my drift?"

  Arthur nodded. His mouth had fallen open.

  "So I put the book inside my overcoat and walked on to the El. It's maybe a ten-minute walk. When I get there, the platform is deserted. The train just left. I'm standing there all alone, when a mugger in a ski mask comes up to me with a knife."

  "Holy crow," Arthur said.

  "Holy shit is what I feel like, let me tell you. This individual tells me to give him my wallet, which I do. He stuffs it into this jacket he's wearing, and then looks around to see if anybody saw him. Nobody. 'Go,' I says, ' I won't chase you.' That's right,' he says. But instead of running away, the gonif stabs me."

  Arthur gasped.

  "Right in the heart. Only my heart's not there, because The Valley of the Dolls is in front of it. All four hundred pages."

  He folded his arms. "So I don't care what anybody says. That was Ethel looking after me." He pointed to the metal sphere. "And maybe this thing's come to you in the same way."

  "It must be," Arthur whispered. "Maybe it's from my mother. She died when I was a baby."

  Goldberg shrugged. "Maybe her, maybe someone else. But it's not Emily's fault she don't understand. She probably don't believe in ghosts, either."

  "No, she wouldn't," Arthur said reasonably.

  "Then you got to explain it to her."

  "She won't listen to me."

  "Not if you run away from her."

  Arthur looked abashed.

  The old man nodded. "Try again, Arthur. Do it now, before she can think of a better argument."

  "Yeah."

  "And tell her you love her. Women like to hear that."

  He made a face. "Okay." He smiled. "Thanks, Mr. Goldberg." He got up and ran to the door.

  "Arthur?"

  The boy looked back, the excitement still in his eyes.

  "Touch her with it."

  "What?"

  "The ashtray. She should touch it."

  "What for?"

  Goldberg flapped his hands to shoo him away. "Go, Mr. What For. Who listens to an old man these days?"

  Arthur ran up the stairs. "Emily!" he shouted. "Emily, I've got to tell you something . . ."

  There was no answer.

  The door was ajar.

  And the first thing he saw was the blood spreading around Emily's body like great red wings.

  "Oh, God," he whispered. There were two gaping holes in his aunt's chest. Her lips were blue. "Oh, God. God."

  He dropped the cup and ran for the telephone. As he dialed 911, the metal sphere rolled toward Emily. It came to rest next to her foot.

  "What is your address?" the voice on the telephone demanded.

  "Four twenty-two East Lansing Street, Number Three-A."

  "What is the nature of the emergency?"

  "My aunt . . ."

  He gasped. Emily's eyes blinked open.

  "Yes? Go ahead."

  "My . . . Emily . . ."

  Emily sat up, a look of bewilderment on her face. Her cheeks were flushed. Her lips were red.

  "What is the nature of the emergency?" the emergency dispatcher repeated.

  Slowly, Emily opened two buttons of her blouse and touched the smooth skin above her bloodstained brassiere.

  "Sir! What is—"

  "Never mind," Arthur said. "It was a mistake. Everything's all right." He hung up the phone.

  He walked over to his aunt and knelt in the blood surrounding her.

  "He shot me," she said.

  "Who, Emily?"

  "I don't know. Two men . . . two shots . . . I was dying." She looked into his eyes. "I was dying, Arthur, and now there isn't a mark on me."

  "Did they take anything?"

  Emily stood up shakily and looked through her pocketbook on the dining table. "My wallet's here. The money's still in it. There isn't anything else . . ." Her hand slapped the wooden table. "My notes. They've taken my notes."

  Her eyes fixed on Arthur. He was holding the metal cup in his hand. They were both silent for a few moments that seemed much longer.

  "He said to touch you with it," Arthur said softly.

  "What? Who are you talking about?"

  Wordlessly he went to the kitchen drawer and came back with a small steak knife.

  "Arthur, what on earth—"

  He sliced it across the pad of his index finger. Bright blood welled out of the narrow wound.

  Emily rushed over to him, but he held up his hand. A day before, it would have seemed a ludicrous gesture, but the expression on Arthur's face was not that of a child. He commanded authority, and his aunt obeyed him.

  Then slowly, tentatively, the boy touched the cup to his finger.

  "Arthur?" she whispered.

  His eyes rolled back into his head. His knees wobbled, but he willed himself to stand. The heat from the cup was coursing through his blood like liquid music.

  When it subsided, he lifted the cup. The wound was healed, gone without a trace. Only the spilled blood remained.

  "It can't be," Emily said.

  "This is what they were after."

  "Then . . . then we'll have to get rid of it. We'll give it to the police."

  Arthur shook his head. "No, Emily. It's mine. It belongs to me."

  "You can't be serious. They'll come back."

  "They'll come back anyway."

  "Then we'll give it to them."

  "Don't you understand, Emily? They'll kill us after they take it."

  Her hand went to her mouth. "But there must be something . . ."

  Arthur wasn't listening to her. "But how did he know?" he asked himself, unaware that he had spoken aloud.

  "Who? How did who know?"

  "Mr. Goldberg. He told me about The Valley of the Dolls."

  "The . . . What are you talking about?"

  He didn't have time to answer. He was running down the stairs.

  "Mr. Goldberg!" he called breathlessly, his legs pistoning down the worn marble.

  The old man was not at his usual post in front of his apartment. Arthur beat on the door with his fists. He made such a racket that the doorman peered around the corner.

  "He's not there, son."

  "Where is he? Where'd he go?"

  The doorman shuffled uncomfortably. "Mr. Goldberg died this afternoon," he said finally.

  Arthur felt as if he were going to faint. "What?"

  The doorman took off his cap and wiped his forehead with his sleeve. "About three-thirty. He keeled over right here in the foyer. It looked like a heart attack."

  Arthur stared blankly at him, unable to speak.

  "Ambulance got here real fast."


  Arthur bit his lip. "Yes, I . . . I saw it out front," he said.

  "Yeah. I was going to tell you before, but with all the commotion and everything, I didn't even see you come in."

  Or the men who shot my aunt, either, Arthur thought dimly.

  "Well . . ."He put his hat back on. "I'm sorry, kid. Guess you kind of liked the old man."

  "Can I see his apartment?" he blurted out suddenly.

  The doorman made a face. "Gee, I don't know . . ."

  "I won't go in. I'd just like to see it."

  The doorman thought about it for a moment, then shrugged. "Sure, why not." He lifted the huge key ring attached to his belt as they walked up the few steps to Mr. Goldberg's apartment. "There you go," he said, swinging the door open.

  A mug half-filled with cocoa was on the coffee table in front of the sofa. Beside it was Mr. Goldberg's photo album.

  Just the way it was ten minutes ago, Arthur thought. He backed out of the room.

  "Hey, you okay?" the doorman asked.

  In the hallway, Arthur turned and ran back up the stairs as fast as he could.

  Emily was on her hands and knees, staring at the stain of her own blood on the carpet. She looked up at him. For the first time Arthur could remember, his aunt's face showed fear.

  Arthur put his arms around her. "We've got to get out of here, Emily," he said quietly.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The apartment's white curtains billowed with a tropical breeze that carried the faintly animal scents of Kowloon and the sea up to the thirtieth floor. Across the bay, bathed in early morning mist, stood the Hong Kong skyline.

  Saladin crossed the white carpet without a sound, then folded himself like a long-legged spider onto a wicker chair. He was dressed in a fine white linen tunic and loose trousers. As a servant brought him tea and a newspaper, he turned his face toward the sun.

  How he had missed that, the sun and the warm air and the sounds of civilization! After four years of artificial light and endless solitude, he felt like a lazy insect crawling out of the soil.

  He caught a glimpse of his reflection in the window, and it saddened him. Those four years had aged him. The lines in his face were deeply etched, and his head sprouted a scattering of gray hairs.

  How old was he? Forty? No, forty-one. He had been thirty-seven when he’d entered the asylum. It was important to be specific.

  Four years was a long time. He would get none of those days back. But he would lose no more.

  Angrily, he turned away from the glass and picked up the London Times. Inside he found an article about the burning of Maplebrook the previous week. Firefighters and other experts had apparently determined that the explosion was not an accident caused by faulty wiring, as was originally thought, but a deliberate act of sabotage.

  "We are working very diligently in sorting through the debris," the newspaper quoted a Scotland Yard source.

  In other words, Saladin knew, the authorities had no clue. There was little reason to blow up an insane asylum. Even the IRA had not claimed responsibility for this one. Yet the work, according to all the evidence, was of professional caliber.

  It was a crime without reason, the article concluded, against men whose faces society did not wish to see. "Yet these faceless men are dead," it read ominously. "Their deaths mark the final chapter in the tragic story of the Towers."

  Saladin laughed, his momentary pique forgotten. He was completely free now. He filled his lungs with sweet air. The smile was still on his face when his houseman announced a visitor, a man named Vinod. Saladin had not seen him for years.

  Vinod had traveled more than seven thousand miles to see him. He had made the journey because Saladin disliked talking on the telephone.

  "Well? Where is it?" Saladin asked immediately.

  The man trembled. "There have been complications."

  The look that crossed Saladin's face would have been enough to turn Vinod's insides to jelly, had they not already been in that condition.

  "We had kept it in a bank. But the bank was robbed. We didn't know about it. No one expected—"

  "Where is it?" Saladin repeated, clapping the man around his neck in a death grip.

  Vinod's limbs twitched. He could no longer speak. Desperately, he pulled a piece of paper from his pocket.

  It was a clipping from an American newspaper. The headline read:

  LOCAL YOUNGSTER INHERITS CASTLE

  Saladin released his visitor and read the piece. It was about a ten-year-old boy named Arthur Blessing who had come into a twenty-four-acre property in England upon the death of an unknown relative. The land, it said, held the remains of an ancient castle. The story was accompanied by a fuzzy photograph of a grinning red-headed boy.

  He looked at the date. The clipping was several weeks old. "Why are you showing me this?" Saladin asked.

  "Look . . . at the background," Vinod rasped, still unable to speak clearly.

  Then Saladin saw it, on a shelf above the boy's head, next to a trophy of some sort: An object, obviously metallic, shaped like something between a bowl and a sphere.

  The cup.

  Saladin's mouth suddenly felt dry. He struggled to contain his fury. "How did it get there?"

  Vinod's breath was foul with fear. "We are uncertain of the details," he said. "It was not among the items confiscated by the police after the robbery. Perhaps it was misplaced, discarded . . ."

  Saladin cut him off with a gesture. "What of this boy?"

  Sweat was beading on the smaller man's upper lip. "We assumed you would want him eliminated."

  "And?"

  "We tried his aunt's apartment. The boy and the . . . the cup were not there. We thought the woman was dead, but . . ."He shrugged. "We found these."

  He gave Saladin the notes Emily had made on the chemical and physical analyses of the metal balls. "I cannot understand them."

  "No," Saladin snapped. "Of course not."

  "After that, they left."

  "With the cup."

  "The . . . yes."

  "Where did they go?"

  "East. We made an attempt on the woman's car in Detroit, but it misfired. Someone stole the vehicle. The explosion occurred less than a kilometer from where the boy and his aunt were staying."

  "So you killed a car thief."

  Vinod's face was a mask of humiliation. "We did not wish to draw attention to ourselves by injuring bystanders. But we were afraid of losing them again, so we tried to kill them both as they left the hotel."

  He paused for breath. Saladin's eyes narrowed. "Go on," he said.

  "It was a freakish accident. An old man fell from a window . . . a suicide, perhaps . . . The bullet struck him instead of the child. We . . . we had to leave . . ."

  "Impossible," Saladin muttered. His voice was low and feral, the growl of a wolf.

  "Yes, Sire. It seems impossible. It is uncanny. We found them again in Pennsylvania . . ."

  Saladin waved a hand for him to stop. "Where are they now?"

  "In England. They left on a flight to London two nights ago from New York. To see the estate, most likely. That is why I came here. My team was ordered to remain in the United States. If you wish, we will go to England, but we will need new identification, contacts for weapons . . ."

  Saladin shook his head. "No," he said. "I won't need you there."

  "Thank you, Sire." Vinod backed away. Saladin smiled at him briefly, and the little man's face flooded with relief.

  When he left, Saladin nodded to his Chinese houseman.

  The servant understood. By morning, Vinod would be dead.

  Surrounded once again by silence, Saladin studied the newspaper picture of the boy and the odd metal sphere behind him. How curious that his name too was Arthur.

  The boy had found the cup by accident, no doubt, just as Saladin himself had found it all those long, long years ago. He too had been only a boy.

  His first memory was fear. When the savages swarmed into his family's great house in Elam a
nd the servant women screamed, he knew his father and older brothers were already dead.

  His mother did not look at him. Years later, Saladin would realize, in retrospect, that her simple act of disciplined negligence had probably saved his life. Since the fighting began, she had dressed her youngest child in the rough clothing of a servant. She treated him as a servant now, ignoring his cries as she faced the soldiers from Kish and their black swords running with blood.

  They cut off her head. They poured through the house like locusts, screaming their grotesque war cries, cutting down the helpless women and old men who were all that were left of the ruling family of Elam.

  The few servants and their children who were spared were marched far north into the moated city of Kish. Saladin, who had never known anything but luxury and privilege, was taken on as a house slave in the home of a merchant. He was fed scraps from the table of the other slaves and slept on the kitchen floor. For three years, until he was eight years old, he brought water to the women's bedchambers and served at the dining table.

  And then came the destruction of the ziggurat.

  It was already centuries old. There had been temples in Elam, also, but none so grand or ancient as the ziggurat at Kish. It stood in the center of the city, surrounded in concentric rings by the public buildings and the residences of the wealthy, then by the mud shacks of the poor, and finally by the wide moat which protected the inhabitants from raiders.

  From the merchant's house where he lived, Saladin could see the priests climbing the ziggurat's hundred steps to offer sacrifices to the gods, those immortal beings who bore the faces and bodies of men but shunned the company of those whose puny lives could be extinguished in the blink of an eternal eye.

  There were those who claimed to have seen the gods. A farmer from beyond the protection of the moat came to tell the king of Kish of a terrifying encounter on the banks of the Euphrates. The god, he said, had risen from the water of the river, carried on the back of a great fish. He was naked, save for a miniature moon tied around his waist. His skin, in the moonlight, had been white as alabaster, and his eyes were made of jewels, sapphires so bright that they shone like stars in the night.

  The farmer had not dared to speak to the god. When the moon-colored deity saw him, he had held up his arms, supplicating the moon to strike down the mortal. The farmer had prostrated himself then, covering his face. When at last he raised his head, the god had flown from his place in the water toward the dark sky, riding on a beam of moonlight.