Bell, book, and murder

by Edghill, Rosemary

  "Something like that," I said. "It happens a lot." Which is true, actually.

  "And nobody cares—because it's us. If it was one of us got popped up here, do you think the cops'd be running around like headless chickens trying to pin it on somebod)^"

  "Now that you mention it, yes. That's what they do. Pin things on people. Usually on the ones who did them."

  We stopped again. Lark drank. He passed the bottle over to me conscientiously, but we were on the edge of an argument all the same.

  "Come on," I said. "Let's go back."

  He grunted noncommitally but turned around. His fingers dug into my shoulder, even through my parka and sweater, as if he'd forgotten I was there.

  "How long are you going to stick up for them?" Lark demanded, and although it's a cliched question, it sounded like he really wanted to know.

  "Some things are right, Lark, and some aren't. . ."I waffled.

  "And so it doesn't matter who you've got on the same side as you, so long as they're right?"

  It sounded logical, but not the way he put it. "No. I mean, yes." He always could confuse me. "You know that—"

  "You don't know what you're talking about," Lark said flatly. Irrationally, that irritated me more tlian any other sort of insult might have. I pulled away from him. He let me go.

  "See you later," I said, walking away fast before either of us could say anything else.

  I stopped at some other parties, ingested an alarming array of mixed drinks, and tried not to brood too much. Nobody mentioned Harm's murder; in fact, even tonight's shooting incident wasn't the

  392 Bell, Book, and Murder

  main topic of conversation. In fact, it was a Saturday night much like other Saturday nights at other HallowFests. I was the thing that had changed. I was seeing these people —my kin, my clan — the way an outsider would; and the more I realized that the problem came from within me, the more irritated I was with them. Over and over I found myself judging my fellow festival attendees as if I were seeing them for the first time. It wasn't a comfortable mindset.

  Eventually I wound up back by Ironshadow's tent. Lark had moved on, so I stuck there for a while. Ironshadow gave me my own bottle of home brew, and I took it down a couple of inches chasing homemade beer and damiana wine and even some authentic absinthe, brewed from a recipe that Scientific American published (in its innocence) a few years back.

  The company was good and the mead was better and the guitar was plajring Richard Thompson and Mike Longcor and the works of other cute guys with beards. But my thoughts weren't pleasant company—for me or anyone else around Ironshadow's tent—so after a while I left there, too.

  On my way down to my cold and lonely pallet in the back of Julian's van I noticed that every light in the bam was on, even the ones upstairs, where nobody was supposed to be right now. Maybe I wasn't the only one who felt the uneasiness in the air, as though the dead who were supposed to ride three weeks from now had come through the Gate Between the Worlds early and stalked among us now without our knowledge.

  The parking area seemed cold and deserted after the Lake Meadow, but I was still full of Ironshadow mead, and between the packing quilts and my sleeping bag and the fact that the human body, left to itself, can radiate quite enough heat to warm even as uninsulated a space as the inside of the van, I certainly wouldn't freeze. I pulled the doors shut behind me and locked them. There was no real point to getting undressed; I pulled off my boots but left my parka on this time. After all, my friend Lace sleeps in her leather jacket even at home, so she tells me; I didn't feel too far outside the normative curve.

  And, I thought with woozy romanticism, if Julian wanted privacy for ritual, a certain fellow-feeling and noblesse oblige required I give it to him. Too many of us have too little safe space in our lives for ritual, and I could not manage to begrudge it to anyone, even if it did leave me sleeping in the parking lot.

  I did not worry about a lot of things that I ought, in retrospect, have worried about, from improbabilities such as being murdered in the van to the likelihood of more nightmares. I didn't worry about what Lark was thinking of me and I didn't even worry about my relationship with Julian, or about what ritual he was doing— and why.

  I went to sleep.

  SUNDAY, OCTOBER 8—2:45 a.m.

  I knew exactly what time it was because my wristwatch glows in the dark. What I didn't know was why I was awake, soberly and completely, out of a dreamless, alcohol-assisted slumber.

  A gunshot?

  It was possible that something like that could have awakened me without my remembering hearing it. 1 did not want to think of what, other than a loud noise, could have done it; psychic summonses and other staples of occult literature, while part of my worldview, tended to lead to rendezvous even less pleasant than those heralded by gunfire.

  What was a fact was that I wasn't going back to sleep. So I could either sit here in the dark for three hours until sunrise, read while running down the van's already weak battery, or find some other way of amusing myself.

  I found the flashlight and turned it on. It failed after I'd found my boots but before I got them on. I groped my way out of the back of the van by touch. It was colder outside than in; no surprise.

  Once on my feet and reconciled to insomnia, I tried to look on the bright side of things. It was my favorite time of night, and a time that I, being a freelancer able to set my own hours, see more often than not, when that part of night that begins with sunset has run its course and the part that's a dry run for dawn hasn't started. The bowl of night; the unchanging moment in a world of change. It was calm (wind is a part of dawn) and dark, and very nearly quiet.

  And now at last I felt what I'd searched for in vain earlier this evening. The breath of the Goddess on the back of my neck; the immanence of deity. It was a good feeling—the security that children leave behind in childhood, that adults have left on the barricades of the Industriad Revolution; an incontrovertible sense of belonging to a world that is complete and whole. It was a gift, and such gifts demand reciprocation. What gift could I make in return?

  I knew the answer to that, but the question really was, what gift was I willing to make?

  I started up the path to the bam, but I didn't end up going to the bam. It was dark, full of sleeping Pagans, and it wasn't my destination anyway. Julian's cabin was dark, too —Registration, at the other end of the row, was the lone light, and I didn't have the feeling there was anyone awake there, either.

  I remembered other HallowFests, where three a.m. would not have meant silence and darkness, where the Bardic Circle had lasted until dawn and we'd cooked breakfast over the embers of the fire. But that was long ago and in a far decade, and those Pagans had changed—gone on to other paths, or just grown up.

  It struck me with a sudden unwelcome force that of my circle of NeoPagan friends and Aquarian acquaintance from the early eighties, I was almost the only one left. Van was dead, Thomas had left us for the Christians, Belle was about to retire, others had moved on, grown up, gotten out. "'And I alone am escaped to tell thee ..." I felt the same sort of spooky embarrassment that you feel when you've just realized you've stayed too long at the party. It was time for me to move on, too—talk to Belle, talk to Lark, take the next step of becoming teacher and leader.

  But if I did that, someday that would end, too. That was the underlying truth of what I was resisting; change is a movement forward in time, and everyone knows that such movement someday ends.

  Or, as in the Reverend Harm's case, is ended prematurely.

  I circled around the cabins, and then around the lake. I had no particular destination in mind; eventually I might go up to the bonfire. There'd be people there; someone always kept firewatch until the embers were cold. But I wasn't really looking for people.

  I thought. Until I heard the voices.

  I was across the near side of the meadow that surrounds the lake, off into an area that's slowly being taken over by second-

  39
6 Bell, Book, and Murder

  growth timber. People camp there some years, but the prime camping area is around the lake, and this year everyone had been accommodated there.

  "Life is pain."

  I could make out what they were saying about the same time I saw the light—closer than was really prudent, but rocks and straggling bushes had concealed the area. Which was one of the reasons they'd chosen it, of course.

  "Pain is truth."

  It was a tiny fire; mostly charcoal on a bed of sand in something that looked like an institutional-size wok. Something that would leave no trace in the morning's light. There were candles in hurricane lamps at three points, putting the wok-fire in the center of a triangle.

  'Truth is life."

  Xharina was standing in the ritual space, across from one of her coveners, wearing a black corset that offered up her bare breasts like cupcakes, and a long skirt that looked like it was made of animal tails. Her tattoos gave her arms a mottled motile surface as though they were wreathed in snakes. She was holding a knife in her hand.

  It wasn't one of Ironshadow's polite carriage-trade athames with the maidenly double-sided six-inch blade. Xharina was holding a point-heavy single-edge Bowie knife with an eleven-inch blade. It flashed like a mirror in the firelight, and leather tails were braided over the hilt, ending in a tassel as long as hilt and blade together. She held the flat of the blade to the flames for a moment.

  One of her coveners—Arioch, I think, though I wasn't sure — was standing opposite her. He was bare to the waist, wearing jeans that were black or leather or both.

  Xharina cut him.

  She started just above the nipple and cut careful diagonal marks into his pectoral muscle — they'd look like the marks of the Sioux Sun Dance when they healed. She pulled the blade along slowly, painstakingly, like a child trying her best to color inside the lines, and I could hear Arioch first catch his breath, then breathe slowly and raggedly, as if what he was feeling were not pain. She cut six lines, evenly spaced, working from bottom to top so that the surface she was working on was always dry.

  "I am the shadow where three roads meet; I am the durable fire.

  I am the night-howling dog; the mortal wound of love; the madness of fear; and the exercise of power. I am mastery and desire, and all roads lead to me. I am the sword in the hand; I am the scars on the soul. I am the whip that drives you; I aim the flesh beneath the lash. I am the shadow where three roads meet—"

  Against the sound of Xharina's voice the others murmured an antiphon, too low for me to hear. Arioch's head was thrown back, in a gesture I'd have difficulty not recognizing as ecstasy, but other than that he had not moved.

  I should not be here. I'd stumbled into a mystery of which I was not initiate; the worship of a more primordial Mother than the aspect my tradition's rituals courted. The power raised here was rawly seductive; gooseflesh hackled on my skin and I felt as if someone had opened the door of a blast furnace in my face.

  Xharina dabbled her fingers in the blood and wrote the sign of the horns on Arioch's forehead with it. He knelt, and she stepped around the fire to approach him. I used the cover of their movement to get away, hoping they hadn't seen me.

  I was more intent on distance than destination; the next thing I knew I was down by Mrs. Cooper's house, along the road that led to the outside world. My heart was pounding as if I'd run to get here; I was flushed and shaking, and once again, like an unwanted guest, I could feel the projected outrage of the outsider inside my skin.

  But what Xharina and her people were doing was not wrong by any stamdard—Goddess knew it was consensual. I'd seen Arioch with Xharina before; nothing in the way he acted indicated that he was someone trapped in a ritual relationship that had gone wrong in any of the many ways those intimate relationships can. Arioch had been happy where he was yesterday, and would still be happy tomorrow morning.

  I believed it; I had felt no threat when I'd accidentally stumbled into their ritual. But the outsider in my skin wasn't convinced. People don't cut people, people don't hit people because they love them.

  Yes they do, I told the inside Outsider. Yes, there was blood, and yes, Xharina had cut him—but it had been done with love, and was not, when all was said and done, so much more abhorrent than the accepted practices of more established faiths. Xharina's coven's was a shamanic tradition — nothing more.

  But it was so far from the self-perceived norm of NeoPaganism

  398 Bell, Book, and Murder

  that I began to understand why Xharina's people were so skittish about networking with the rest of us. The greatest taboo in the Gardnerian-derived traditions is to allow blood to touch the ritual blade —Craft tradition holds that such a blade must be destroyed at once, and a new one consecrated. But Xharina's coveners must blood their blades regularly, if what I'd inadvertently witnessed tonight was any indication.

  All unwelcome the malicious monkey part of my mind demanded attention, assuring me that those who were willing to cut shallowly could cut deeply as well—and that Reverend Harm had died of a knife wound.

  They had no motive! I told myself sharply, as irritated as if some stranger had made the suggestion. And it was true —Hoodoo Lunchbox had never been to Paradise Lake before; this was their first HallowFest. They could certainly not have had any previous exposure to Reverend Harm.

  But if I were going to pardon shamanism, my mind insisted, surely I should admit that human sacrifice was a part of magic as well?

  Fortunately this was too ridiculous for even me to take seriously; it broke the spell of my overheated internal monologue. It was a long way from a little shamanic bloodletting to murder; you might as rationally accuse a cigarette smoker of being a pyroma-niac. Yet the fact remained that Harm had been ritually murdered. Or, I thought ag£iin, had been made to seem to be ritually murdered, because once I had ruled out magic and religion I could imagine no nonsecular motive strong enough to actually motivate the deed.

  I knew where I wanted to go, now.

  It was hard to reach the pine forest without crossing the Upper Meadow where the Bardic Circle was, but I managed it by dint of a long detour and a scramble up the steep slope I'd avoided yesterday. If there was a deputy posted up here I didn't see him, but there was no reason for him to be standing right over the murder site, after all.

  We were almost out of the bowl of night, now; in less than an hour there would be hints of dawn in the sky.

  I'd dreamed this, I realized suddenly. I was standing in the forest, just where I had been when I'd seen Miriam. Ahead of me — toward the Circle —I could see the "Police Line —Do Not Cross" tape

  glowing brightly yellow in the reflected light of the fire in the meadow below. The firelight edged the downward slope sharply, giving me the illusion of enough light to see by.

  Here was the last place Jackson Harm had come to alive. He'd met his killer here, and died.

  It took a bit of casting about to find the exact spot where the body had been. The police don't outline victims' bodies in white paint the way you see in the Naked Gun movies. But I'd been here three times, under circumstances which enforce the vividness—if not the accuracy—of memory, and I found the likely spot eventually. There was a short stake with a bit of red ribbon tied to it stuck down into the forest mulch; I didn't remember seeing it before, but probably the Sheriffs Department had left it to mark the site.

  I knelt down, the way I had . . . was it only this morning? I tried to still myself and open myself, and do what good divination does, allowing myself to see what there was here to see. I touched my fingers to the ground where Harm had been. Tell me who killed you. Tell me why.

  I felt a chill reasonless excitement; the adrenaline rush that comes before the conscious mind understands the reason for it.

  There was a sound.

  It brought me out of half-trance like a slap in the face; it was a real-world sound; the sound of a broken twig and someone trying to shuffle quietly through the dark. I jerke
d to my feet, and all I could think of was that I was guilty of trespassing and about to be caught.

  But I wasn't the only one.

  "Uh . . . hi," Wyler Pascoe said.

  I could just make him out in the darkness; a teenaged blob of light and dark, identifiable mostly by the T-shirt I'd seen him wearing yesterday at the diner. Wyler Pascoe. Sergeant Fayrene Pascoe's underage son.

  "What are you doing here?" I said. It wasn't particularly gracious as opening gambits go, but he'd scared me. And now that I'd had time to think about the consequences of his being here, I wasn't any less worried.

  He made an inarticulate gesture —at least it might have been inarticulate and was certainly a gesture. I couldn't see him very well. The fire was not as bright as it had been at its height, and was at the bottom of the hill besides; most of what I could make

  400 Bell, Book, and Murder

  out of Wyler was his pale skin and pale hair and the glinting silver pentagram he wore around his neck. I couldn't remember whether it'd been tJiere in the diner or not.

  We didn't need this. I didn't need this. HallowFest didn't need this.

  "Uh ..." Possibly Wyler wasn't sure himself. "Hey, you're Bast, right?"

  "Right." I thought about heavy-metal gangstas and rock music Satanists and that Wyler seemed to be out pretty late for a boy whose mother, presumably, knew the worst that Gotham County had to offer. I thought about the fact that Wyler probably knew Jackson Harm by sight and could easily have gotten close to him, and that murderers get younger every day, and that here he was, now, at the scene of the crime — or back at it.

  Of course, so was I.

  "Is there something we can do for you here, Wyler?" I said, in my best customer service tones.

  He looked from me to the fire, much as if he was missing an appointment he longed to keep.

  "I came to be a Witch!" he blurted out.

  I shook my head; not at him. At the situation, if at anything, and the fact that life goes on.