The Open Channel

by Jill Morrow

  He frowned as his fingers traced the string of lights in a desperate search for the end. Kat usually kept migraine medication in the house. Even she had seemed surprised to find the prescription bottle empty. Oh, well. She’d been under the weather for the past few days, feeling tired and slightly sick no matter what the hour. Who could blame her for misplacing her usual efficiency?

  Asteroth’s return had certainly done nothing to enhance their lives. If he and Kat had felt stressed and tired before, they were doubly so, now. The only difference these days was that they spent a little more time together as they tried to figure out what to do.

  “Daddy?” Claire broke into his reverie. “There isn’t any good snow left over here. Can I move next to the swing set?”

  The swing set was even farther away from the porch than where Claire stood now. With any luck, her next move would carry her all the way over to the garage.

  “Sure, sweetheart. Knock yourself out.”

  Once again, a grin escaped him. His baby might look like her mother, but her personality was all her own. Her goofy good nature warmed his heart. Her constant energy made him proud even as it exhausted him.

  At least Julia had looked relaxed when her ride showed up that morning. She’d dashed out in a flurry of shin guards and hockey equipment, a positive testament to glowing good health and girls’ athletic programs. Stephen wished that Kat could have seen that. It might have eased her worries to know that just sharing the burden with her parents had produced something of a liberation in their elder daughter. In fact, were it not for the fact that Francesca still lay motionless in the upstairs bedroom, it would have been tempting to believe that this latest chapter of spiritual weirdness had come to a close. He longed to relegate all that fevered talk of a “child of light” to idiotic comic-book fare.

  Claire hopped around the swing set on one foot before settling onto a swing. “Aren’t you going to the restaurant today?”

  “I’m not sure yet.” He half hoped to poke into Angel Café later that afternoon.

  “Don’t,” Claire said. “I like it when you’re home with us.”

  He smiled. “I know. I like being home with you, too. But the restaurant needs me.”

  “Why?” Claire’s eyes widened over the reddened tip of her nose. “Everything runs okay when you’re not there every minute.”

  He wanted to refute it, but he couldn’t. It was exactly as it should be: years of good management practices had left Angel Café able to function without his constant presence. He’d already called down there three times that morning. Each time he’d been assured that everything was running smoothly. Why was it so hard to admit that his own sound business sense had earned him some well-deserved time away from work?

  “Besides, Mommy needs you, too,” Claire said, and Stephen nailed her with a searching look. She had an uncanny way of stating what he already knew and didn’t feel like acknowledging. Perhaps she was more like her mother than he cared to admit.

  “I know that, Claire,” he said. There was nothing else to say. The out-of-the-mouth-of-babes concept was highly overrated.

  He heard the screen door creak open behind him. Kat, looking lost with the huge quilt from their bed wrapped around her, padded out onto the porch in her bedroom slippers.

  “Hey.” Stephen reached out a hand. “You shouldn’t be out here like that. You’ll get sick.”

  She drew in a ragged breath and sank down beside him. “No, it’s okay. I need a change of scenery.”

  He wrapped an arm around her. Her head instinctively dropped against his chest.

  “How’s the headache?” he asked.

  “Better. I think the worst has passed. I just feel so weak. I feel like a hollow little shell with nothing left inside.”

  “Well, no wonder.” Never mind the migraine. The way the past weeks had gone, it was a miracle they hadn’t just bolted the doors, pulled down the shades, and taken to cowering in the basement.

  Kat seemed to read his thoughts.

  “I don’t suppose you managed to figure out our next step while I was upstairs languishing in bed.”

  “I can’t even figure out the Christmas lights.”

  “I haven’t been much help. I’m sorry, Stephen. I’ve just been feeling so punk.”

  He gave her shoulder an absent-minded squeeze. “That’s understandable. Just get well.”

  Kat stared thoughtfully across the yard. Claire had given up on the melting snow piles near the swing and had moved toward the back fence. “You didn’t need me the last time we battled Asteroth. You got marching orders on your own. You heard the next step even when the rest of us were clueless.”

  “That was fifteen years ago.”

  “I know. But I can’t help wondering how you did it. What was different?”

  He couldn’t help the bitter edge that crept into his laugh. “You know, Kat, I’ve been trying to decipher that one. The only difference I can come up with is that I didn’t believe in any of this stuff then. Now I do.”

  “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “Since when has any of this made sense?” He sighed. “I keep trying to cram this information into some sort of order. If I could only see some logic to it, maybe I could get back whatever sixth sense I used before.”

  Kat’s brow furrowed as she tried to digest his words. He saw that any additional information would catapult her right back into the realm of headache pain. Now wasn’t the time to try to unravel this riddle.

  “Look at Claire,” he said, searching for a diversion. Their daughter had found an untouched pile of snow and now dug into it with renewed vigor. “The kid never gives up. She couldn’t hit me with a snowball when she stood six feet away. What makes her think she’ll do it from all the way over by the fence?”

  Kat smiled in spite of herself as Claire’s little red mittens formed a new snowball. “She doesn’t have a handle on logical cause and effect yet. That’s what I like about kids. In their world, everything is still possible.”

  Her words hung on the air, then sunk in. They turned to stare at each other.

  “We’re looking for a logical solution,” Stephen said.

  “We don’t believe for a minute that we can fight this,” Kat said at the same time. She turned toward Claire again, then hastily shoved Stephen aside. A snowball whizzed past his right ear, landing in a white heap in the middle of the Christmas lights.

  “Good throw, Claire!” Stephen sounded more amazed than was probably good for the kid’s ego.

  Claire swaggered toward them, a wide grin on her face. “You didn’t think I could do it.”

  Stephen laughed, trying to salvage his credibility. “See what practice can do?”

  Claire melted into her mother’s outstretched arms. “I knew I could do it.”

  Kat took off her daughter’s wet mittens and tucked the cold fingers beneath a fold of the quilt. “I see,” she said.

  Claire sighed. “No, you don’t. You only think you do.”

  The moment was distinctly odd and made no sense. Stephen bit back the irritable words that rose to his tongue. Their daughter’s precocious little voice made her sound like a rude fortune cookie, like a TV drama idea of wisdom, like…

  …the child of light.

  He stared into Claire’s green eyes. All this time he and Kat had assumed that Julia was the child in need of protection. Could Claire be Asteroth’s target, the child so dreaded and feared?

  He placed a gentle hand on her knee. “Claire. Do you know how we can get Aunt Frannie back?”

  She seemed to consider the question as Kat gently stroked her hair. “I’ve been thinking about that, Daddy. I’m not really sure, but I have some ideas.”

  A pink flush flooded Kat’s cheeks as she, too, began to connect these new pieces of the puzzle. “Sweetheart, remember that night when you mentioned that Aunt Frannie took a bridge to get where she is now?”

  Claire nodded.

  “What bridge?” Kat asked. “Where?”

/>   “I don’t know what bridge,” Claire said slowly. “I can’t figure it out. I know that she has to come back home the same way she got to where she is.”

  Stephen glanced at Kat, puzzled. “But we lost her at the cathedral, and Mom and I already went back there.”

  “You didn’t lose her,” Claire said. “She chose to go. And just going back to the last place she was isn’t enough, I don’t think. Something must have been different the second time you were there.”

  “Well, of course it was,” Kat said. “Aunt Frannie wasn’t with us.”

  Stephen felt a curious sensation at the back of his neck, almost a prickle. “Kat, she wasn’t with us on either end of the bridge. She didn’t know we were trying to bring her back. That one change would have entirely altered the energy flow at the cathedral.”

  Kat put a weary hand to her forehead. “Forgive me, Stephen. I’m just not at my best. You need to be extremely precise.”

  He straightened as the idea crystallized in his mind. He couldn’t tell whether it was his own idea or one born elsewhere. At the moment, he didn’t care. It seemed the first warm ray of light he’d felt in days.

  “Listen, Kat. What if the bridge we’re talking about isn’t a physical one?”

  “Well, it couldn’t be, could it?” she said, obviously annoyed. “Nobody could build a bridge to the fourteenth century.”

  “What if the bridge is built by some sort of energy flow? By frequency coordinates in time and space? What if it’s created by things unseen?”

  Kat groaned as intangibility threatened to overrun her mind.

  Claire’s mouth dropped open. “That’s good, Daddy.”

  Stephen threw her a double-take, but his own train of thought drew him away from her unusual words and back to the concepts rapidly flowing through his mind.

  “That still makes it all nearly impossible,” he continued, almost to himself. “If we have to duplicate the same frequencies to bring Francesca back, that means we need to pray at the cathedral at the same time we did when she left us.”

  “It was two-fifteen in the afternoon,” Kat said, surprising him with her recollection.

  “How do you know?”

  She reddened. “I looked at my watch to see exactly how much time I was wasting.”

  “Okay, then we know the time. We know where we sat in the Lady Chapel. You and I can always go back, Kat, but I’m not sure it will work if Francesca isn’t in on it.”

  Kat’s eyebrows flew upward. “What do you suggest we do, Stephen? Send her a postcard? This is nuts. It can’t be right.”

  “Send Julia to get Aunt Frannie,” Claire said.

  Her parents stared at her. She shrugged.

  “Well, she’s already been there, hasn’t she? She can go back and tell Aunt Frannie to get to the right spot at the right time.”

  “But Asteroth…” Kat’s voice twisted onto the breeze.

  In front of the house, a car door slammed. “Thanks for the ride,” they heard Julia call.

  “This can’t be right,” Kat tried again, but her voice sounded unconvincing.

  The front door slammed. “Hello!” Julia called through the house. “Anyone home?”

  Stephen cleared his throat, but Claire answered first.

  “We’re on the back porch, Julie. And wait till you hear what’s happening next!”

  23

  THE PACKED DIRT OF THE PRIORY COURTYARD FELT HARDER than before against the soles of Francesca’s feet. Her body lurched sluggishly toward the main gate. It was as if she’d plunged into a familiar river, only to discover the downward pull of an unexpected new current. Had she really grown so quickly accustomed to weightlessness that even the slightest reminder of physical form produced a metaphysical version of the bends?

  Footsteps sounded from the cloister. Dame Margaret scurried across the stone walk, skirts billowing behind her like dark sails. Elinor, much younger and fleet of foot, followed close on her heels.

  “Dame Margaret!” Elinor gasped. “Dame Margaret, forgive me this impudence, but I must speak with you at once.”

  Margaret stopped. Elinor, caught off guard, plowed into her.

  “You must speak quickly, then.” Margaret managed to stay upright. For all her stringiness, she seemed constructed of iron. She reached up a hand to smooth her wimple. “I must find Madame Alys at once. There is a catastrophe in the making.”

  Elinor flushed. “Then it is good I speak with you. I have news of Madame Alys.”

  Margaret’s face softened as she studied the girl before her. Francesca saw at once that the mistress of novices had a soft spot for this particular charge. She wondered briefly if Margaret thought of Elinor as the daughter she’d never had. Then she noticed the self-righteous squaring of the older woman’s shoulders, the smug set of her mouth. Dame Margaret obviously saw Elinor as an appendage, a copy of herself who, with proper guidance, might rise to the heights that she herself had been denied.

  Margaret lowered her voice. “Speak, then, for Isobel has run away. I must alert Madame at once. There is little time to lose.”

  Relief flashed across Elinor’s plain face. “Oh, then that explains—”

  “Explains what?”

  The novice swallowed hard. “I saw Madame Alys and Father Gregory leave. They took neither oxen nor wagon and carried nothing. Madame has been so ill of late, and we have relied so on kind Father Gregory to help us through this difficult time, that I…I feared my own thoughts, Dame Margaret. Naturally, I sought your wise counsel.”

  “Naturally.”

  Francesca took a step closer as Elinor continued. Dame Margaret was certainly right about one thing: the nun and the girl were alike enough to relish the thought of Alys’s downfall. Elinor lowered demure eyes, but her artless voice came straight from the serpent in the Garden of Eden.

  “Dear Dame Margaret, you have provided an answer to soothe my worries. They have most surely gone in pursuit of Isobel. Are you sure that she has left us?”

  “I watched her go.”

  “You didn’t try to stop her?”

  Margaret’s mouth formed a thin, hard line. “You heard Madame Alys as we stood in the courtyard with Mistress Kate. We wanted to help; she bade us leave. I only honored her request. Besides, I was quite far away by the time Isobel left. I watched from the convent window as she slid through the gate with that viper, Hugh.”

  A small sigh escaped Elinor’s parted lips. It was the only indication that she, too, might have enjoyed that opportunity. Margaret’s razor-sharp glare chased away any remnant of yearning. Elinor hastily pulled her face into a more appropriate mask of obedience.

  “Perhaps, then, all will end well,” she said. “Father Gregory and Madame Alys will have her home by nightfall. And you, Dame Margaret, shall see to it that all is in order here at the priory until they return.”

  Francesca recognized Margaret’s reaction as a good old twenty-first-century smirk. The nun sniffed as she tossed her head and started to walk down the cloister. Francesca was shaking her own head when Margaret’s gaze brushed across her and stopped.

  “Oh, my dear Lord.” Margaret staggered backward.

  Elinor rushed to her side, arms open to catch her in case she fell. “What has happened? Are you ill? Perhaps the excitement of this day—”

  “No.” Margaret brushed a bony hand across her eyes, then stared toward Francesca again. She blinked. “I thought I saw a woman: here, yet not here. But the vision is gone now. It was merely a trick of the light. Come, Elinor. There is much to be done. There is always much to be done.”

  Francesca remained frozen in her spot as the two skimmed across the stones of the cloister and disappeared from her view.

  There was no longer any doubt about it. She was growing solid. Curious, she raised her hand to the sun. Not that long ago she’d actually seen light pulsing through each vein, invigorating each molecule and filling her with an otherworldly tingle of energy. Now she saw the raised veins and knobby joints of a woma
n in her sixties.

  She had little time to lose.

  She hurried toward the priory gate. Before, she’d noticed only the light and beauty of her unfamiliar surroundings. How fresh the unpolluted air had felt against her skin, how delicate the church spire had seemed against the backdrop of high, blue sky! Now she noticed more worldly details. An occasional whiff of sewage attacked her nostrils, while the yellow of Dame Margaret’s remaining teeth was apparent even from yards away.

  Living exclusively in spirit was one thing. Being trapped in an alternate physical reality would be intolerable. She could never survive here, stuck forever in medieval England. Never mind the daily inconveniences, the struggle against ailments whose cures remained centuries away. She needed Kat, Stephen, and their girls as much as she needed to breathe.

  She stopped at the main gate. Minutes ago it had seemed the most logical destination. Now that she’d arrived, she had no idea what to do next.

  “Very well,” she said out loud. It helped to hear the sound of her own voice. It sounded calm and capable in the still of the summer air.

  Every sinew in her body wanted to go home, but a crystal-clear truth cut straight through the longing. Even if she figured out how to get back to Baltimore, danger remained unchecked. Asteroth, who could bend centuries as well as physical form, would wait at every door. It wouldn’t matter if the door were made of fourteenth-century wood or modern steel. Vile evil would lurk beyond it, crouched and ready to destroy.

  “Very well,” Francesca said again, settling back against the gate. She’d faced this demon before. One could even say she’d won that battle—or, rather, that God had won it through her. Her faith in the light had stayed strong, and the answers had been there that blistering day fifteen years ago. Of course solutions would await her now. She only needed to ask, then listen. The worst action she could take would be to disbelieve that.

  She closed her eyes and drew in a long, deep breath. She slowly exhaled. The iron bars of the gate felt hard against her spine. The priory seemed to recede into haze as she found a comfortable, steady rhythm on which to focus.