Black Swan Rising

by Lee Carroll

  “Go on,” Dee said, slowly lifting his right hand and splaying his fingers toward the box. “It’s what you’ve come for, isn’t it? I’ll not get in your way.”

  “Why not? You’ve certainly thrown enough obstacles in my way so far.”

  Dee smiled . . . or, rather, he was still smiling, his lips frozen in a lifeless grin. I noticed too, that his hand remained in the air, fingers fanned open. “I was curious to see how hard you would try to retrieve the box and whether you’d be able to make it here. I’m a very old man who’s lived a very long time. There’s not much that entertains me anymore, but your activities these past few days have been quite diverting.”

  “Is that why you’ve unleashed the demons of Discord and Despair on the city? For entertainment?”

  Dee shrugged. The gesture was supposed to look casual, but I noticed that his right shoulder remained hunched up to his ear. His hand was still in the air and his face was frozen in the same smile. “Let’s just say that every once in a while I like to shake things up and see what falls out. This time it’s you who’s landed on my doorstep.”

  “So you don’t mind if I take the box?”

  “If you can take it, my dear,” he said, lifting one eyebrow, “you’re welcome to it.”

  The eyebrow remained cocked. I realized now what was wrong with the way Dee was moving. Each motion was labored and, once made, he was fixed in that position. He’d been sitting in the amber electric field so long that he was stuck in it, while I could still move—as long as I moved toward the box. He wouldn’t be able to stop me from taking the box.

  I took a step forward. It was like walking on those moving walkways in the airport—one step seemed to take me three steps forward. I was inches from the open box . . .

  Which Oberon had told me not to look in.

  But if I closed the box, then the energy field might disappear and Dee would be able to move. Even though he’d told me I was welcome to take the box, I had no reason to believe he wouldn’t spring on me the minute he could. I’d have to wait to the last minute to close it. Of course that didn’t mean I had to look in it.

  I stepped forward and raised my hands to the box, keeping my eyes above the open lid. As soon as I touched the lid, though, I had that feeling I’d had when I first touched the box in Dee’s shop—as though it belonged to me. What harm could it possibly do me? I looked down.

  At first the light was so bright it blinded me, but then, slowly, my eyes adjusted to the glare and I could see perfectly. I could, in fact, see for miles. For inside the box was another world—a world of green meadows starred with wildflowers and stitched with clear streams. I could hear the purl of the running water and smell the wildflowers.

  I leaned closer to the box and the meadows rolled toward a stone tower that looked familiar. I came closer—I felt as though I were flying over the hills, skimming the high summer grass like a lark—and saw that the tower was reflected in a still, clear pool. It was, I realized with a thrill of recognition, the tower and pool from my dreams, only instead of one black swan, a dozen white swans glided across the crystal surface.

  “Do you recognize it?” Dee’s voice came as if from far away although he was only a few feet behind me.

  “I’ve dreamed about this place”—another memory prickled at the edge of my consciousness—“and heard about it. This is the place my mother used to tell me about. The Summer Country, she called it, or the Fair Land. I thought it was just a story she made up.”

  “No, it’s a real place, a beautiful place, yes? It is always summer there and no one ever ages.”

  I saw now that there were men and women in the woods surrounding the pool. I couldn’t see them very clearly—they seemed to slip in and out of the green shadows—but I had an impression of great beauty.

  “Once our world and the Summer Country existed side by side and the fey and humans could pass from one to another,” Dee went on, “but then our world grew more populous and humans stopped believing in the Summer Country and the doors between the two worlds began to close.”

  How had my mother put it? The door to the Summer Country opened in a glimpse, never in a second look. Yet here I was staring into the heart of it—and I knew, somehow, that the tower and the pool were the heart of it.

  “There are very few places where one can still cross over into the Summer Country, but this marvelous box can open a door anywhere if you know how to use it. Do you see those silver necklaces around the swans’ necks?”

  I leaned in closer. Dee was right. Each of the swans wore a silver chain with a large oval pendant around its neck. I remembered that the black swan in my dream had worn such a pendant. I touched the medallion at my own throat, the one I’d made from the ring my mother had given me, and felt it grow heavier.

  “Those are the swan maidens. Perhaps you’ve heard the stories. When the silver chains are removed from their necks, they become women and they can step into the human world, only they need the chain to go back. One of those swan maidens strayed into the human world a very long time ago and fell in love with a mortal man. But he betrayed her and stole her silver chain and medallion. He had them melted down and made into this box, and that is why the box can open a door between the worlds.”

  I pictured the black swan gliding on the pool at sunset and remembered the cry it made as it was shot by an arrow. Something was wrong with the way Dee had told the story, but I couldn’t remember what. I was listening to what he was saying. “If you like, you can step into that world right now.”

  I could? I became aware that the light pouring out of the box had surrounded me in a glowing halo. I looked down and saw that I was no longer standing on a Persian rug, but green grass. I looked up and saw not the amber panels of the tower room, but blue sky. I was standing on the threshold of the Summer Country, the magical place my mother had told me about when I was little . . . and if my mother told me about it . . . ? If she knew about it . . . ? I looked ahead of me and saw standing, on the far side of the swan pool, a woman with long dark hair. It was my mother as she looked when I was a child: young, beautiful . . . not burnt and mangled in the car wreck, but whole and alive, waiting for me in the Summer Country. She reached out her hand and called my name. Garet, she called. Garet . . .

  “Garet!” The third call came from behind me. It wasn’t my mother’s voice. It was Will’s. “Garet, don’t go. You’ll never be able to come back.”

  So? I wanted to say, only it seemed like too much effort to speak out loud. Why would I want to come back to this world of strife and pain? Why wouldn’t I want to join my mother in a land of ease and perpetual summer?

  Again I heard Will’s voice behind me calling my name, but instead of calling Garet he was calling Marguerite. The anguish in his voice made me turn around. Will was behind me, but he stood at the edge of a wood and he was dressed in a green tunic and slim, fawn-colored pants. His hair was longer and blonder, his skin was golden from the reflection of the setting sun and, I realized, ruddy with the glow of mortality. This Will wasn’t a vampire, but neither was he the Elizabethan young man who had fallen in love with Marguerite D’Arques. This man, I felt sure, was an ancestor of that man and this time was a much earlier time. Nor were we in the Summer Country. We stood on the edge between the worlds. I also knew that this man was not supposed to be here. The sun was setting behind me, and once it set, something would happen that he was not supposed to see. He had promised me in that long-ago time that he would never follow me to the pool at sunset, but he had broken that promise. And now I would lose him forever. I already felt myself changing—my neck lengthening, my arms stretching wide, the skin between my toes growing webs, the prickle of feathers sprouting from my skin. I saw the look of horror on the youth’s face. And then, as I glided out onto the lake, I saw him lift a great curved bow to his shoulder and pull an arrow back.

  Why? Did he think it was the only way to keep me from leaving him? Had he heard all the stories of the enchanted animal wives—the selk
ies, the undines, the swan maidens—who left forever once their mortal lovers had broken the one admonition—never to look upon their wives in the moment of changing?

  The arrow pierced my wing and I felt myself changing back, my human limbs sinking into the water, the heavy silver chain around my neck weighing me down . . . and then I was being dragged out of the water, the chain torn from my neck, the arrow pulled from my arm.

  The man was weeping. “Don’t go!” he cried in a voice like Will’s. “Don’t go!” But I was already going. I was turning into something else.

  “I have to go,” I told him, “but I will always watch over you and your sons and all the sons and daughters of your race. I will become like a watchtower guarding the border between the two worlds.”

  And then all was black . . . but I still heard Will’s voice calling me, “Don’t go, Garet! Don’t go!” and I knew that I was back in the high tower and I knew who I was. I was the Watchtower pledged to stand on the border between the worlds and protect humanity, because of the love I had for one man even after he broke his promise to me.

  I opened my eyes and saw the silver box in my hands. The world of the Summer Country beckoned green and gold, my mother standing on the far shore, one hand raised—but whether in greeting or farewell I didn’t know.

  I closed the box. Instantly the amber light in the room swirled around me like a funnel cloud. I turned in it, feeling its power move with me like a great cloak. John Dee flexed his fingers, gathered a ball of the glowing stuff into his hands, and hurled it at me like Mariano Rivera closing out a tight game with a fastball.

  It hit me square in my sternum and I collapsed. Dee leapt from his chair and was on me, wrenching the box from my hands, but I held on to it. His face was close to mine, his sulfurous breath hot on my skin.

  “You fool! You’ll be sorry you didn’t take your chance to leave this world when I’m done with it. What you’ve seen so far is nothing!”

  I felt my grip on the box loosening, but then Dee’s hands lost their grip instead. He flew off me, as if he’d been plucked up by a giant forklift, and hit the wall. The amber panel shattered and all the electricity it had soaked up exploded. Dee’s body jerked as if he’d been electrocuted and he slumped to the floor, unconscious. Will stood over him, his lips spread back over his fangs in an angry snarl. He lunged at Dee, straight toward his neck, but then recoiled, sparks flying between them. I smelled something burning and realized it was Will’s flesh. The panel behind Dee was aflame and so was the next panel. An electrical fire was racing from panel to panel, and the light of the fire was burning Will’s skin.

  “Leave him!” I cried, struggling to my feet with the box still cradled in my arms. “We have to get out of here.”

  Will turned to me and for an instant I don’t think he knew me. His eyes glowed red in his fire-scarred face and his teeth were bared. But then the red in his eyes subsided, replaced by the flickering glow of the amber fire. He nodded once and reached out his hand for me, but I couldn’t take it while I held the box, so I let him put one arm around my back and the other under my knees to pick me up. He had just stepped out of the room with me when I shouted for him to stop and put me down.

  Something in the command in my voice made him listen to me. I handed him the box and ran back into the tower room, which had become an inferno. I looked over to where Dee had been lying a moment ago but he was gone. Had he vaporized from all the energy he’d absorbed? Or had he somehow escaped? I didn’t have time to find out. I hadn’t come for him.

  I crossed the room and reached over the mantel for the portrait of Madame Dufay. The frame was singed and the canvas had browned in one corner, but her image was intact. When I grabbed the frame, it was so hot that it seared my hand, but I tucked it under my arm and ran onto the metal landing just as the tower room was engulfed in flames. An explosion shook the iron stairs and filled the tower with a noxious yellow smoke. I could barely see through it to the other side of the landing where Will stood leaning against the railing. I rushed to him, afraid that he’d been hurt in the explosion, but when I reached him, I found that the man wasn’t Will. It was Oberon, freed from his metal chains, but still weakened.

  “What have you done to Will?” I demanded.

  Oberon laughed pathetically. “Do I look like I’m in any shape to do anything to a vampire? No. He released me from the chains—only for your sake, he said—and asked me to get you out of here safely.” He gave me a sad smile. He looked sorrier for me than when he’d left me paralyzed in my father’s apartment. “And he told me to tell you he was sorry. Then he left, taking the silver box with him.”

  The Summer Country

  For weeks after, when I thought about that night, the part that was hardest to remember wasn’t the glimpse I’d had of the Summer Country—that remained painfully and tantalizingly clear—but the walk back through the aqueduct with Oberon. I did remember going down the spiral stairs with him and that he was talking about Will.

  “I knew he’d take it if he got a chance. He believes he can use it to make himself human again. He’ll take it to the border of the Summer Country and summon the creature of the lake to make himself human again—and if that creature makes it into this world, it will be worse than if Dee had succeeded completely in unleashing the demons of Despair and Discord. I have to follow him and stop him.”

  A quick glance through the slitted window we were again passing strongly suggested that Dee had, at least, been thwarted in completely unleashing the demons of Despair and Discord. Nothing was burning now. One of the buildings that had been aflame before had clearly sustained damage, but the other appeared to have been untouched. I blinked, wondering if I was seeing accurately, but, no, only one building seemed to have had a fire. I could only speculate that at the moment I had acquired possession of the box—when the demons had presumably been annihilated—there’d been some small reversal in the progression of time, some reverberating recoil so powerful that the minutes in which the second building had caught fire had been erased. I felt a sense of triumph wash over me. New York City likely wasn’t burning anymore, and maybe in some places lives had been saved by the time retraction.

  Who was I, Garet James, to battle the darkest demons of the universe? I had asked myself what seemed like only hours before. Now the question had an answer at least for me. I was in fact up to it. I was the Watchtower, and a worthy one. Even if I was still—and at the same time—that frailest of humans, Garet James.

  “I’ll go with you,” I called after Oberon, who was marching ahead oblivious of my pause. I hurried to catch up with him.

  He hadn’t answered at first. We were entering the gate chamber and we had to be careful not to slip down the steep slope . . . then we were on the bridge and we had to be careful not to fall into the hollow pylons. Only when we’d navigated the gate chamber on the Bronx side of the bridge did he turn to me and say, “Perhaps it’s better if I take it from here.”

  The next thing I knew I was lying in the woods beside the Weir house in Van Cortlandt Park, watching the sun coming up through the bare trees. My clothes were soaked and torn and smeared with mud. My right hand was throbbing with pain, and when I looked at it, I saw the skin was swollen and blistered. I remembered burning it when I grabbed the portrait of Madame Dufay, and I sat up to look for the picture . . . but my head started spinning and I had to lie down again before I could find it. I patted my jeans pocket for the lover’s eye and felt a lump there, but my fingers were too tender to dig into the pocket. It could wait. I would rest awhile before trying to go home. There was no rush. Dee had been defeated and Will was gone. No one was waiting for me at home.

  I drifted off again and awoke sometime later to the sound of a woman’s voice. “Ma’am, are you all right? Have you been injured?”

  “She looks like her hand’s been burned,” a male voice said. “There’s that psychopath who’s been setting homeless people on fire.”

  Homeless? Me? I wanted to tell him that
I had a home, but when I opened my mouth to speak, all I could do was croak like an agitated frog. My throat felt as if it had been seared. I opened my eyes and saw a young man and woman dressed in the khaki uniforms of the urban park rangers. “I think she inhaled a lot of smoke,” the man said. Then he spoke into a walkie-talkie to request an ambulance.

  I tried to tell him that wouldn’t be necessary, but I must have fallen asleep again because the next thing I knew I was being lifted and carried out of the woods. Things got jumbled after that. I was in an ambulance, but I was with my father and he’d been shot. I was lying in bed in a hospital room looking out the window at steam rising from the streets—great white plumes that assumed the shapes of dragons and serpent-tailed women. My father was there, hovering over my bed, his face creased with anxiety and grief.

  “Don’t worry,” I told him in a hoarse voice that didn’t sound at all like my own, “I took care of John Dee. Everything will be all right now.” But that only made my father look more worried so I tried not to talk any more.

  Detective Kiernan came and told me that he was sorry he had ever suspected my father. “The men who were hired to rob your gallery no longer claim that your father hired them. They seem to have no memory of who did, but we matched the canvas we found at Dee’s shop to the canvas of your Pissarros. A man matching Dee’s description has been tied to an art theft in Paris which Interpol is investigating.” That worried me, but I didn’t say anything. I certainly couldn’t explain to Joe Kiernan that Dee had vanished from a burning tower.

  I knew the burning tower itself had been real, though. A front-page headline in the first New York Times I read in my hospital bed told me that the High Bridge Tower was going to be completely restored after a severe fire on what had come to be called Arson Night left it “looking like a charred and smoldering ziggurat.” The cost would be upward of $300 million, the article went on, but that was just a small portion of the more than $5 billion Congress, the NYS Legislature, and the NYC Council had appropriated to repair and restore damage from the worst urban fires since the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.