Black Swan Rising

by Lee Carroll

  “Did she say what?”

  “No, she didn’t. I’m afraid she didn’t trust me entirely. She resented how the Watchtower had ruled her mother’s life and believed that she had died because of it. She made me promise not to initiate you if anything happened to her. And then she died. I suspected Dee might have been behind the accident, but I found no sign of him in New York afterward. Then I heard through contacts abroad that he’d been spotted in France. Perhaps Dee learned that was where your mother had been headed and he went to find out why.”

  We’d reached our stop. I followed Oberon out of the station. When we got up to the street, I was surprised to see that it was nearly dark already. I checked my watch and saw that it was four thirty—sunset at this time of year, but there should have been a lot more light. When I looked up at the sky, I saw why there wasn’t. A heavy fog obscured the western sky, smothering any last rays of the setting sun.

  “We’d better hurry,” Oberon said. “If you saw Dee in your memories, he probably knows you’ve been to see Ddraik. He’s not going to bother going after your friends anymore—he’s going to go straight for you.”

  We walked briskly, but at the last street corner on the way to my house we had to slow up because a large crowd had congregated, blocking the pavement. The crowd and thick strands of fog obscured our view at first, but soon we could see that, near the curb, a half dozen police officers had surrounded two well-dressed men who, from their bloodied faces, had been in a fistfight. Police were handcuffing them but the taller man was still screaming expletives at the shorter man. The shorter man’s attaché case lay open on the sidewalk near his feet, the pile of papers in it beginning to be strewn about by the wind. I observed that his face seemed to be streaked with tears as well as blood. I thought of helping the man with his wafting-away paper pile, but as I took a step toward him, the police deepened their ring around them with some new arrivals.

  Then Oberon and I started to slip through the crowd, and I overheard a pale, slender woman in a quilted red riding jacket say to her companion, “It’s been the darndest day, Angelique. I also saw a fight like this on the way to my subway station in Queens this morning. Also normal-looking businessmen. And Chris called me at work this afternoon—he’s off today—to tell me there were two separate house fires raging at opposite ends of our block. What a bleak coincidence; there hasn’t been a fire on the block in ten years! Both have been put out, but still, I’m starting to get the creeps. Is something in the air?”

  “Back in the islands we call it voodoo wind,” Angelique answered in a soft but somehow emphatic voice. “It is creepy, but I haven’t run into anything today until now.”

  “Discord,” Oberon muttered under his breath. “A sometimes erratic but always most poisonous demon.” He glanced around at the fog, which was starting to break up in the wind, but was still coiling around lampposts and trees with the sinuousness of multiplying snakes. In the east, the sky was graying. “Angelique may not have much longer to wait,” he rumbled, taking my hand briefly as we walked on.

  At the town house I told Oberon to stay on the second floor and wait for me while I got something from my studio on the third floor. I found him sitting on the couch, sniffing the empty wineglasses.

  “Mandrake root and hellebore,” he said. “The combination increases melancholy and makes the user susceptible to suggestion.”

  I sat down next to him and used the remote to turn on the TV and select the movie Jay and Becky had watched. I fast-forwarded to the end where Robert Osborne came on and paused. “There,” I said, pointing at the portrait of Madame Dufay. “I knew I’d seen this woman’s eyes before, but really I’d just seen one of her eyes.” I opened my hand and showed Oberon the lover’s eye brooch.

  He jumped up, knocking over the wineglasses on the table. “Where did you get that thing? Cover it up!”

  I closed my hand. “I got it at Dee’s shop. Why are you so afraid of it?”

  “Dee can see through it.” Oberon moved closer to the TV screen and bent down to look at the portrait. “Yes, you’re probably right about the eye matching the portrait. They’re a pair. An enchantment was placed on both the portrait and the miniature, so that if you look through the eye of the portrait you can see what the lover’s eye looks upon—sort of like a remote camera. In fact, I remember when this particular portrait was painted.”

  “You do? Did you know her? She looks so sad.”

  “Madame Dufay? Yes, she had good reason to be sad. I knew her in Paris in the days just before the Reign of Terror. Now there was a time when the demons of Discord and Despair ran rampant! Madame Dufay was a young woman at the court of Louis the Sixteenth. She fell in love there with a young man of mysterious birth and questionable repute. He commissioned a painter to do her portrait, but she knew that because the king frowned on the romance, he would not be able to display it. So she asked the painter to do a miniature of just her eye, so that her lover could wear it and no one but she would know to whom he was professing his devotion. While the artist was painting the eye, she said to him, ‘If only I could see through this eye, I would always be with my lover.’

  “And the painter, who had fallen in love with her, thought to himself, ‘If she could see how her lover conducts himself while away from her, she would see he was unworthy of her.’ So he went to a man in Paris who was rumored to know how to make spells. The magician agreed to give him a magical pigment to use in his paintings to effect the spell, on the agreement that he would be named the painter’s beneficiary in the event of his death. The painter agreed, completed the portrait and the lover’s eye, and gave the portrait to Madame Dufay and the lover’s eye to her lover. The first night he wore it, though, an attempt was made on his life. Seeing this through the eye, Madame Dufay, who was nearby, ran to his aid and was killed herself. When the painter learned what had happened because of him, he hung himself, and his paintings—including the one which Madame Dufay had yet to pay for—became the property of the magician—”

  “Wait, don’t tell me . . . the magician was John Dee.”

  Oberon inclined his head. “He must have left the eye in his shop hoping you would pick it up and that he’d be able to spy on you. You must destroy it.” Oberon reached for the brooch in my hand.

  “No!” I said, pulling my hand away. He looked at me in surprise. I was surprised myself. Since the ordeal in Ddraik’s cave I’d felt a shift in my relationship with Oberon, but I hadn’t realized until now that I knew something he didn’t . . . or at least I thought I did. “I think the eye wanted to be left behind. I think it—she—wanted me to find her. There’s a link between us. I can feel it.”

  Oberon sucked in his breath and narrowed his eyes at me. “Ddraik was right. You are stronger than I thought. But still, you don’t have my experience. I agree that there might be a link between you and Madame Dufay, but how is that going to help us find Dee?”

  “Like this.” I opened my hand. The eye blinked in the sudden light. Oberon backed away. Why is he so freaked out by it? I wondered. Something in the way he had told the story seemed . . . off to me. As if he were reciting from a script. But I didn’t have time to ponder the question right now. Oberon was correct about one thing: Dee could be using the portrait to watch us. I was hoping, though, that the portrait was still hanging over his fireplace.

  I held the lover’s eye between my thumb and forefinger and looked at it. The almond-shaped brown eye narrowed, as if studying me, and then, to my amazement, winked. I laughed out loud and then, turning the eye away from me, lifted the brooch and held it up to my own right eye, fitting it into my eye socket like a jeweler’s loupe.

  For a moment my vision blurred and doubled. A kaleidoscope of images revolved across my field of vision. When I covered my left eye, the disparate images resolved into one. It was not Dee’s lair, though. I stood in a garden at night, lit by gaily colored paper lanterns and peopled by men and women dressed in eighteenth-century costume. The men and women both wore wigs, th
e women’s hair piled high on top of their heads and crowned with flowers and birds’ feathers.

  “What do you see?” I heard Oberon ask.

  “I think I’m watching one of her memories,” I said. “I’m in a garden . . .” I was walking down a dark path bordered by white roses. At the end of it was a marble fountain, its water jets aglow in the light of a hundred torches. “I think I’m in Versailles! At some kind of party.” A girl in a yellow silk dress rushed by me, laughing, pursued by a young man in blue silk. They both wore masks. “A masquerade party! You said Madame Dufay was at the court of Louis the Sixteenth. Does that mean I might see Marie Antoinette?”

  “This isn’t a sightseeing trip,” Oberon said primly. “Can you ask Madame Dufay to show you Dee?”

  “Could you show me John Dee, please?” I asked, and then, resurrecting my high school French, “Je voudrais voir John Dee, s’il vous plaît.”

  I felt the body I was in stumble. Well, no wonder, I thought, looking down at the dainty, petal-pink, high-heeled slippers on Madame Dufay’s feet, who could walk in these? They are gorgeous, though.

  Madame Dufay pointed her toe and turned her heel, showing off the spray of feathers on the heel of the shoe. She knew I was there! She could hear me.

  “John Dee, s’il vous plaît,” I repeated.

  She picked up her head and started walking toward the fountain at the end of the path. A circle of revelers surrounded a man in a fawn-colored frock coat and black cloak. He wore a mask shaped like an owl’s face and seemed to be performing some sort of magic trick. He waved his hand above a crystal goblet and a bouquet of roses appeared. The crowd applauded and he swept down in a low bow, revealing that the top of his head was bald. When he looked up, I saw amber eyes glinting through the slits of the owl mask.

  “John Dee!” I gasped. “He’s at the party.”

  “Tell her you want to see John Dee now! In 2008.”

  “Will she understand that?” I asked, but she was already turning away from Dee and walking toward an open pavilion where couples danced a minuet. She was headed toward a man in a dark peacock-blue coat with white lace at his throat and a black-feathered mask over the top part of his face. He bowed low and I felt myself—or Madame Dufay—curtsying in return. Then I was placing my hand in his and I was swept into the dance. The brightly colored lanterns blurred into a rainbow circle around us, the gray eyes behind the mask the still focal point in the swirling world. I felt I knew those eyes.

  “This must be the man she fell in love with,” I said. “The one she gave her portrait to.”

  Oberon sighed. “Can’t you hurry her along?”

  “I don’t think so. I think she wants to show me these things. She’s been trapped in this painting for over two hundred years. Who am I to rush her?”

  The truth was I didn’t want to rush her. I could feel my body swaying in time to the music, those gray eyes holding me as tightly as an embrace. I wanted to dance forever, but suddenly I was jolted out of the moment. Someone had bumped into Madame Dufay on the dance floor. As she turned to see who it was, I caught a glimpse of a black man in a long green silk caftan, a white turban on his head, and a thin white mask over his eyes. “Hey—,” I began, but the feeling of being jostled transposed itself to present-day New York. The brooch came dislodged from my eye, shattering the vision into a million fragments of flowers and fountains and masked faces.

  I quickly put the brooch back to my eye, but the scene had changed. I—or Madame Dufay, rather—was sitting in a cold, bare room facing a wall of windows that framed a view of tiled rooftops. A little to my right a pale young man with tousled blond hair and a paint-spattered blue smock stood behind an easel, dabbing paint to a canvas with a paintbrush.

  “She’s having her portrait done,” I informed Oberon.

  “Wonderful,” he remarked drily. “Perhaps we’ll be treated to a visit to her hairdresser next.”

  “No, this is important. She’s telling the painter that she wishes she could see through the eyes he is painting so that she might watch his lordship while she’s not with him.”

  The painter looked up from his painting and met her—my—eyes. “Perhaps, madame, you would not like what you saw,” he said.

  “I would always rather know the truth,” Madame Dufay replied.

  A shadow fell over the young man’s face. The sun had moved below the roof of the building opposite the painter’s garret. “We’ll have to stop,” he said. “The light’s gone for today.”

  The scene went dark and then I was standing on a street—or rather in a doorway—sheltering from the rain. A carriage passed by and splashed cold water on my feet. I looked down and saw that the hem of my dress had been muddied, and then, when I looked up, my attention was drawn by a flash of blue across the street. It was the young painter going into a shop. There was a sign of a disembodied eye hanging over the doorway.

  “It must be Dee’s shop,” I said aloud. “The painter must be going to find out how to give the lover’s eye the power of sight. If I could see inside—”

  As if in response to my wish, Madame Dufay stepped out onto the street. I felt the rain falling on my head and shoulders, smelled the dank odor of sewage and refuse. The glass window of the shop was fogged over but I could make out the outline of the painter as he approached a counter where a man was bent over something.

  “A mortar and pestle,” I said aloud. “The shopkeeper is grinding something. It must be an apothecary’s.”

  “Yes!” Oberon said impatiently. “Dee often posed as an apothecary. Now ask her to show us Dee now!” He said the last word so loudly I jumped. On the street in Paris Madame Dufay tripped. A view of rain-slicked cobblestones swam up toward me, then the scene abruptly shifted. I was sitting up high, as if in a balcony, looking down on a small amber-colored room, the floors covered with Persian rugs, walls lined with paintings. Somewhere below me a fire crackled; it reflected on the face of the man sitting before it in a red chair.

  “This is it!” I cried, recognizing the room I’d glimpsed below the East River and seen on the TV set. Only the angle was different. I was looking down at the room because I was in the painting above the fireplace. From this angle I could see now that the room was shaped like an octagon.

  “It’s a tower room, I think,” I said aloud.

  “Are there any windows?” Oberon asked.

  I scanned the wall opposite me. It was covered with amber panels and paintings . . . but then I noticed a narrow gap between two of the panels. “It looks like a tall, skinny window, like the kind you’d have in a medieval tower . . . only . . . damn!”

  “What?” Oberon demanded. “Can’t you see anything?”

  “No.” The window was dark. “Of course not. It’s already dark outside.” As I spoke, though, I realized I did see something. “There’s a red light in the distance . . . some kind of beacon.”

  Oberon made a sound of disgust. “That could be anything! She showed you her memories before, can’t she show you the room in daylight?”

  “I don’t think so,” I answered. “Those memories all had meaning for her. I don’t think much if anything that happens in this room matters to her.” I was startled to hear my voice crack. The sadness had stolen over me stealthily, the agony of spending eternity trapped in paint and canvas seeping into my own bones. I could feel tears gathering in my eyes. One welled in the space between the brooch and my eye. The scene of John Dee’s lair wavered and swam in front of me, the red light outside the window swelling like a dying star. But suddenly, with a small gasp, I recognized the light. I couldn’t tell if my perception came through sight or memory or stirred somewhere deeper—in the flickering embers of knowledge that Ddraik had bequeathed me, perhaps.

  “I know what that light is!” I said, letting the brooch slip out of my eye. “It’s the beacon on top of the Cloisters. I saw it from Will Hughes’s apartment.”

  “Perhaps John Dee’s tower is in Will Hughes’s apartment building,” Oberon sugge
sted.

  “No, I don’t think there’s an octagonal tower on that building. There’s only one tower I recall in that neighborhood.” I got up and went to my father’s bookshelves. My father loved New York City history, and I’d given him many books over the years on various topics about New York. I picked out one and quickly looked up what I wanted and brought the open book back to the couch for Oberon to see.

  “The High Bridge Water Tower,” I said, pointing to a picture of the tall skinny tower that stood beside the Harlem River. I had asked my father about it once, and he had explained that it had been built along with the Croton Aqueduct to provide water to higher elevations in Manhattan. “See, it’s octagonal and it’s connected to the water system—or at least it once was. It hasn’t been used in years, but the tunnels that connected it to the old Croton Aqueduct are probably still there.”

  “And those tunnels meet the new water system at Jerome Park Reservoir in the Bronx,” Oberon finished for me. “He might not be able to send water through the old tunnels, but he could send fog. Yes, it makes sense.” As he was speaking, Oberon had taken out a pack of Post-it notes from his pocket and now he sketched an octagon on it.

  “It’s at 174th Street and Amsterdam Avenue,” I said, pointing to a map next to the picture of the tower, thinking that Oberon would want to write that down. But instead Oberon drew a sideways S through the octagon—like half an infinity symbol—and added a dot to the center of the picture.

  “Wha—?” I began, but then Oberon slapped the note on my forehead and my mouth—my vocal cords, my throat, my whole body—turned to stone.

  The Wrong Way

  “I’m so sorry, Garet,” Oberon said. “But Ddraik is right: you are becoming much stronger, much more quickly, than I’d anticipated.”

  He leaned forward until his face was only inches from mine. Instinctively I wanted to put more space between us, but I couldn’t even blink.