Bell, book, and murder

by Edghill, Rosemary

  After that, we got lost—which was also a part of my yearly HallowFest experience, edthough it is something I try to avoid each time. All I know is that we reached New Paltz just fine and after that all is darkness.

  Paradise Lake Campground does not, to my knowledge, waste money on advertising. There is only one small sign visible from County 6, and that sign directs you not to the campground, but up a long, twisting, one-and-a-half-lane road that goes on long enough for you to be sure you've miissed your way. It is especially easy to think that at 12:30 in the morning after having been certain you were going the right way twice before.

  Should you demonstrate the proper perseverance, the one-and-a-half-lane road offers you the opportunity to turn onto a one-lane dirt road with a hand-painted sign on it which merely says "Office." We passed "Office" a few minutes later, driving slowly be-

  292 Bell, Book, and Murder

  cause of the ruts in the road and the state of the van's suspension.

  The Paradise Lake Campground consists of approximately one hundred acres, most of which are scrub, second-growth timber, and marsh. There is, as advertised, a lake, in which you can even swim if you are less squeamish about our woodland friends — leeches, water moccasins, and large pike —than I am. There are also outdoor accommodations for oh, say, 250 tent-and-RV campers on the meadow surrounding the lake, but the real reason that HallowFest chose the site and continues to use it is the indoor accommodations: the bam (dormitory style, sleeps between 100 and 125, depending on how friendly they are) and the cabins (of which there are four, suitable for holding between 2 and 10 people each).

  Since HallowFest generally draws 250 attendees, tops, what this means in practice is that anyone who wants to sleep with a man-made roof over his or her head can. Some people do tent every year, and we get a couple of RVs, mostly from New Jersey and points west, but most Pagans, nature religion aside, are indoor people.

  I stopped the van in front of the row of cabins. In the headlights they looked like miniature houses, all painted yellow. When I turned off the engine and killed the headlights the cabins and the rest of the campsite vanished.

  I'd forgotten how dark the country was. I turned the headlights back on, praying the van's antique battery would take the strain. Julian handed me the flashlight he'd been reading by without comment. I opened the door. It was like opening the refrigerator and looking in. I'd forgotten how cold the countryside got, too.

  The lights went on in one of the cabins and the door opened. In the diffuse light of the headlights (fading fast, dammit), I saw that it was Maidjene.

  Maidjene is about my height and makes Nero Wolfe look like a famine victim. She has long brown hair and a taste for flamboyant dress that makes her well-over-an-eighth-of-a-ton even more impossible to miss, and a lacerating sense of humor, as befits the originator of Niceness Wicca, the Wicca for people who find Mr. Rogers too confrontational. Tonight she was wearing a neon-striped caftan with an orange fake-fur robe over it and looked like a Day-Glo Obi-Wan Kenobi doll.

  "Bast? It took you guys long enough. I thought you said you

  were getting up here before six," Maidjene said. I could tell by the broad vowels we'd woken her up; she's from someplace like Kentucky or Indiana originally and sometimes it catches her unawares.

  "I didn't say a.m. or p.m. We got lost," I added feebly. Behind me, I heard Julian climb down out of his side of the van and come around to where I was. His glasses flared as the beam from my flashlight struck them and I flicked the light off.

  Maidjene sighed. "Well, you might as well not have showed up if what you want is to set up; we can't get into the bam until tomorrow."

  "What?" The Snake's table would be set up on the barn's second floor; I'd expected to spend the night there.

  "Furnace broke last week. Heat's still off. Won't be on until tomorrow and even if Mrs. Cooper puts it on at six it's going to be damn cold in there unless I wanted to pay to have it turned on today, thank you very much, which is extra, which I didn't," Maidjene said, more or less all on one breath. "Why don't you all come on in?" She went back inside her cabin, leaving the door open.

  I got back into the van and turned off the lights before the battery went completely dead and followed Julian (so I presumed) into Maidjene's cabin.

  The cabin smelled of dust and damp; the odd blank smell of a place that people use but don't live in. The cabins at Paradise Lake are essentially single rooms, generally containing neither plumbing nor cooking facilities and only rudimentary furniture. This particular one had greenish wallpaper with a faded pattern of wreaths and roses on it. I resisted the totally unwarranted temptation to duck my head as I entered; the rooms are normal height, even though this one seemed more crowded than was strictly believable. It was filled with boxes and backpacks and groceries £ind duffel bags, suggesting that most of Maidjene's coven was already here. Somewhere.

  'They're next door, since why should anyone else have to get the niceness up just because you and others of your ilk are late?" Maidjene said, seeing me look around. "Raven Kindred's coming, and Fred and Leigh Eind their guys, and some people got here earlier: Fireflower Coven from up to Boston and a bunch from Endless Circle, but they're camping out. There's Diet Pepsi in the cooler, and I think there's maybe some coffee in the Thermos," she added.

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  Coffee sounded good; I had the hollow watery feeling in my bones that comes from late-night long-distance drives, and I knew there was at least half an hour of shifting and hauling ahead before either Julian or I could think of bed. I searched for the Thermos while Maidjene looked for her paperwork; we struck pay dirt at about the same time.

  "Julian Fletcher, Karen High tower," she muttered to herself, checking off the names we use on our checks in what is usually called the Real World. Our "real" names, though not by the yardstick most Pagans use. To Pagans and Witches, our real names are those we chose, for reasons of secrecy or sacrament, when we came to this place in our lives. It's always a minor shock to hear myself called "Karen." My name—my re£d name —is Bast.

  And until now 1 hadn't known Julian's last name at all.

  "Friday arrival, Saturday through Monday, Merchandng, Feast, Indoor, and Parking," Maidjene recited, confirming that we were intending to sell goods, were both participating in the Sunday Night "Feast" (the only meal HallowFest provides, and a logistical nightmare), required indoor accommodations, and needed parking. Every item had its own list, generated courtesy of Maidjene's computer.

  I would not organize one of these festivals for dominion over all the kingdoms of the earth and real cash money besides. The picnic I helped Belle —that's Lady Bellflower, my former High Priestess—put on had been bad enough, and that was one day and local. I poured myself coffee into a clean mug I'd unearthed along with the Thermos. The coffee was still hot, but at this point I wouldn't have cared whether it was hot or not, so long as it wasn't decaf.

  "License number?" Maidjene asked. I dug the paper I'd written it on out of a pocket and read it back to her. She made a note on yet cinother separate sheet, yawning.

  "We were supposed to have the programs ready," she said, "but Bailey didn't get up here with them until late and they aren't collated yet. I'll give you your badges. Maybe sometime tomorrow,'' she added vaguely, referring, I hoped, to the programs.

  Julian was standing in the comer by the door, keeping a wary eye on the piled clutter. He looked wildly out of place, assuming anything short of a Fundamentalist godshouter could be out of place at a Pagan festival. Julian is a Ceremonial Magician, which meems that he is regimented, hierarchical, ascetic, disciplined.

  reasonably monotheistic, and 100 percent more organized (except when making road trips) than the average God-or-Goddess-worshiping NeoPagan. He is also, as you may have gathered, the oblivious focus of my unilateral sexual fantasies.

  "So where are we going to sleep, if the barn's closed?" I said, when Julian didn't. Maidjene was digging through another pile
of boxes with the patient late-night determination of a mole with a mission.

  "So many kids this year, we're putting them in the bam in one of the big bunkrooms," Maidjene s£iid, which wasn't exactly an answer.

  "What joy," I said. The idea of trying to sleep in —or next to —a room full of children ranging from infant to ankle-biter, all with volume controls set at "Max" was not one that really excited me.

  "You said we could have one of the cabins," Julian said. I turned around and stared at him. Maybe she had; Julian'd made all the arrangements having to do with the Snake.

  "Well sure," Maidjene said, as if Julian were stating the obvious. "If we aren't using them for families with kids, somebody's got to be in them."

  She came up with the box containing the badges and badge-holders and handed us two. I took mine, making myself the usual empty promise that I would fill my name in by the end of the weekend.

  It didn't used to be like this. You didn't need to show a badge at a festival—just being there was proof enough that you had a right to be there. But that was before violence and gate-crashers of various stripes made it vitally necessary to know who belonged and who didn't. Now there are badges, and even something approaching security.

  All forms of regimentation begin with an innocent desire for comfort.

  "I'll just unlock the one on the end," Maidjene said, "and you can put your stuff in there and then shift the van on down to the parking lot." She handed me a placard to put in the van window to indicate that it, too, was a member of the festival, and picked up a set of master keys for the campsite that were attached to a Frisbee-sized piece of pine with the campground's name on it. "Here we go. I'll have it open in a minute."

  "Do we get a key to the cabin, too?" Julian said.

  Maidjene and I both stared at him blankly.

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  "So we can lock it?" he added.

  The one last holdover from the Summer of Love in the NeoPa-gan Community—at least at the smaller festivals —is this: nobody worries particularly about keeping his possessions under lock and key. None of the inside rooms in the bam locked, and I'd never heard of anyone locking the cabins — even the Registration cabin — during a HallowFest.

  Of course, this attitude is tempered by enough reality that most people still don't leave their wallets lying about unattended, but the sense of community—real or imagined — keeps the pilfering to a minimum.

  "You won't need to lock it," I told Julian. 'This is his first festival," I told Maidjene. Julian shrugged.

  Maidjene led us down to the end of the row of cabins. It was quiet enough that the crunch of my boots on the gravel sounded loud and 1 could hear the sound that the wind makes when it blows through pine branches. The edge of the lake that gives Paradise Lake its name is just behind the cabins, and the reeds around it rattled as the wind passed through them. At a place and a time like this it's easy to believe that the Earth is a living and caring being.

  "Are you coming or not?" Maidjene said from the doorway of the cabin she'd opened.

  There was a bare bulb on a short chain, swinging slowly back and forth. The floor was a grungy green linoleum, flecked with white and yellow, and the walls were covered in a shrunken and aged paper patterned with yellow ducks carrying pink umbrellas on a pale blue background. There was a bare double mattress in a vinyl zip-bag lying in a comer.

  "Okay?" said Maidjene. "See you in the morning." She wandered off again, keys jingling.

  The cabin was about standard for HallowFest accommodations; it had more or less what I would have gotten in one of the bunkrooms, more than 1 would have gotten upstairs, and had the advantage of being quieter and more private. There was a door in the back wall, and when I opened it I found that Maidjene had really done right by us: there was a rudimentary washroom tacked on to the back of this particular cabin. I turned the tap £ind was rewarded with a hesitant trickle of brown water, which meant that the toilet would almost certainly be working, too.

  Despite this luxury, the lodgings were probably not up to a standard that Julian was used to.

  I turned back to him. He had an odd smile on his face.

  "All the comforts of home," he said neutrally.

  I felt the usual awkwardness of being in a situation where one person—guess who? —has an emotional agenda and the other doesn't. "Welcome to the lap of nature," I said. "Let's get the stuff out of the van."

  We could have left the stuff in the van for tomorrow, but there was no guarantee we'd be able to bring the van back up here then, and I was damned if I was going to take the chance of having to schlep all this stuff up from the parking lot. Unloading the van took a little bit longer than packing it had, and while we were doing that another band of lost travelers arrived in a white oversprung station wagon with Rhode Island plates. I discovered then that Maid-jene's coven was manning registration in two-hour watches, since once Maidjene had squared the newcomers away and directed them to the meadow—where they could amuse themselves by trying to set up the tent they'd brought with them in the dark—Maidjene woke up Bailey and went to bed.

  By that time I was on my last load out of the van. Julian had pulled his share of the weight but he had more of an interest in being able to find things again in the morning than 1 did. When 1 brought in the last box he'd already started unrolling bedding and had even set up what looked like a small folding tray-table.

  "I'm going to run the van down to the parking lot. I'll be back in a few," I told Julian. He waved, absently, turning to another box. I closed the door carefully behind me.

  The parking area is a not unreasonable distance from the bam and cabins, but the walk back up the sloping drive was an eerie thing at something after one in the morning. With all the lifting and carrying I wasn't cold anymore, and from a familiarity with the area I wasn't worried about marauding bears or bands of Kallikaks. This year Samhain fell near the full moon, which meant that now, three weeks earlier, the sky was dark. The stars were brilliant, the air was clear, and the scurrying sounds from the woods were raccoons at the largest, and more likely mice. Nothing to feel threatened by.

  What I did feel was a sense of complete isolation; a sense that

  298 Bell, Book, and Murder

  not only was tJiere no human companionship immediately available, but that even the future possibility of human companionship had been somehow erased, as if everyone else had gone and left me alone here forever. Standing in the dark, on the road that led back up to the cabins, I knew I was actually not only in the middle of civilization, but five minutes' walk, at most, from several other people, some of whom were even awake.

  And it changed nothing. I stood there and wondered what it would have been like to live in a time, not so very long ago, when the entire human race numbered less than a billionth of its present total and I might have walked for days without seeing any sign either of civilization or of people. I decided that New Yorkers prefer social isolation to real isolation and continued up the path.

  When I got back to the cabin, Julian was brewing tea.

  He'd been busy while I'd been gone. Several boxes had been piled together and a red cloth spread over them: on this makeshift table were a lit candle, a smoking brazier, and a mirror, as well as various other odds and ends including a small glass bottle half full of dark oil. The incense was strong enough almost to overpower the burnt-dust smell from the laboring ancient electric heater we'd brought along.

  Julian had also set up the folding table that would go into the bam tomorrow, and along its seven-foot length were arranged a little kettle on a ring over a flaming spirit lamp, a Rockingham pot waiting for hot water, a tin of English biscuits, and two white mugs.

  It was not an unreasonable amount of gear to travel with — I have friends in the Society for Creative Anachronism who bring not only tables, but chairs, bedsteads, and entire ynrts to their camping events —but it was a level of domesticity I'd somehow never associated with Julian.

  He h
ad his back to me and was opening another box, out of which he lifted a teairdrop-shaped pressed-glass decanter, its stopper made leakproof with wax, and two tiny matching glasses. Those he set on the tray-table. Then he turned.

  "I thought something hot would be good," he said when he saw me.

  "Where did you get all this stuff?" I said, meaning, mostly, the clever method of making hot water without electricity.

  "From my lab." Julian smiled. "Alchemy."

  Which was not unreasonable, considering Julian —if medieval

  alchemy (as distinct from its nineties offspring, spiritual alchemy) didn't work, he'd want to know exactly why not. Julian is a specialist in the theory and history of magic, and, in his own quiet way, a rigorous scientist.

  1 sat down on a stack of book boxes, which turned out to be a mistake. Sitting still made me realize how damned cold it was in here, and 1 knew from past experience that the heater would shut itself off long before the room began to be warm. The cold didn't seem to bother Julian at all.

  I took my tea when it was ready and tried not to obsess on the pile of quilts and sleeping bags on the floor. The single pile. I'd been expecting to roll up in my sleeping bag in the bam—but then, I'd expected that the heat would be on there, too.

  "I thought it would be warmer that way," Julian said neutrally. He was staring at the candle, not at the bed, and the mug of tea and the biscuit he was holding made him resemble an impoverished English vicar. If this was a pass, it was a damned indirect one —he might mean nothing more than what he'd said. I had a sudden passionate curiosity to know what he wore to bed.

  "Yeah," I said. "Warmer."

  Sometimes my savoir-faire amazes even me.

  If Julian had been Valentino himself I would still have worn a T-shirt, sweatshirt, sweatpants, and two layers of wool socks to bed; there's no sense in being a damned fool about things and you try sleeping in an unheated cabin in Gotham County in the middle of October wearing anything less. I got first use of the bathroom, which might have been chivalry on Julian's part, except for the fact that this also meant that I got the bed first, and Julian's alchemical skills did not extend to conjuring electric blankets out of nothing. I curled into a fetal ball under the layer of sleeping bag and blanket and shivered, knowing I would be warm . . . someday.