The Left-Hand Way

by Tom Doyle

  “I prefer to think of it as long odds that invite divine intervention.”

  That got the briefest of smiles from her, which I also thought was against all odds and a divine intervention. Then, with her usual coolness, she said, “I know a way.” She retrieved her phone and said, “British Airways.”

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “I’m booking us a flight from Gatwick under one of my covers.”

  “I thought you said flying was too risky for all concerned.”

  “Right. We won’t be on the plane.”

  “Boat, then?”

  “No, still too great a risk.”

  “Train?” The Chunnel seemed equally risky to me, but perhaps she knew otherwise.

  “You’ve caught the scent, but you’re still not there.”

  “OK. We can’t drive off the island, I’m not a great swimmer, and trying to walk on water would be, as you put it, a bit blasphemous, so what do you have in mind?”

  She waved me quiet as she booked a flight to the United States. Then, she ended the call and said, “Bicycle.”

  “Bicycle what?”

  “We’re going to bicycle to France.”

  CHAPTER

  EIGHT

  I might have protested about biking conditions on the English Channel, but Grace explained about the Chunnel service tube, which doubled as an emergency exit from the UK for spiritual practitioners if things ever regressed to the bad old days. The quickest way for us to cross the Channel undetected would be to bicycle through the service tube. So Grace drove us toward Folkestone and the British entrance to the Chunnel.

  I should have rested in the car, but I had too much on my mind, and too much to say. “Thank you for saving me again. That was nice work, by the way. You were pretty economical with the truth with the human lie detector.”

  “Another of my many gifts,” she said. Stealing and lying. I was sensing a pattern here, and it seemed to involve the Ten Commandments. But she couldn’t have deceived Dee much. She must really hate my family.

  “Do you think Roderick could have possessed him, or brainwashed him?” said Grace. Despite being fully justified, she must have been rethinking her rage at his profound betrayal. She wouldn’t bounce back any time soon from that treachery.

  “He was old,” I said with some care. “The Left Hand can offer one thing that many old men can’t resist when death stares them in the face.”

  “Death stares me in the face all the time,” she said. “Why would it be different for him now?”

  “Maybe because now his decline and death seem unnecessary—a waste.”

  “He was incorruptible,” she insisted.

  “Even for someone so old, the practice makes life feel too sweet to give up.” I refrained from adding another motivation. Dale had hinted that sex had been involved in my ancestor Abram’s corruption. The Don seemed to have lust on his mind as well.

  “I suppose an OBE and a pat on the back no longer suffice,” said Grace. “I hope we didn’t kill him.”

  I didn’t reply to this. Without the syringe, he might die soon anyway. Instead, I said, “His family’s motto is too appropriate.”

  “You know Virgil?” she said, sounding more surprised than when she had seen the Don with a gun.

  “That much,” I said. Dee’s motto, “Hic Labor,” was from the Aeneid, and referred to the difficulty of escaping Death, which for the last scion of the family had apparently become the overruling obsession. How many more like him were out there?

  * * *

  We reached Folkestone and the Chunnel entrance in the early morning of a dark, gray, monochrome day. Nearby, the large hillside chalk drawing of the White Horse glowed with warding craft. Kent was another Zevon location. Was I finding an oracle in a pop song? I supposed the Gabble Ratchets were something like werewolves. If so, that meant they’d still be on our trail.

  When we parked the car, Grace handed me a pill. “Amphetamine, half dose. You’ll need to be at your most wakeful for just a little while longer.”

  At the end of the drive, I had been drifting mentally, so I popped the pill. “What about you?”

  “I’ll be fine for another few hours. Let’s go.”

  “To simply walk to the service tunnel entrance?”

  Grace gave the cross around her neck a kiss. “Yes,” she said.

  My view of the world changed into the fish-eyed lens of the stealth screened. Of course, that was why we had gotten so far: Grace was skilled at stealth. I should have realized. Stealthers like that bastard Roman tended to be particularly colorful when they weren’t invisible, and Grace’s choices of vehicles and clothes were as colorful as any I’d seen.

  We jogged unseen past the check-in booths, then followed a side road that led down to a rectangular opening between the tracks. A light drizzle descended, but the pill was kicking in, and the weather couldn’t get me down.

  Within the rectangular entrance was a chamber with enormous yellow airlock doors closing the far end. Grace opened the first of several hidden storage compartments within the floor on each side, revealing the mountain bicycles, each with a large reflective number on it. They were twenty-one speeders but otherwise generic, not fancy, like the commuter bike rentals in some major cities, and they looked old and thoroughly used.

  “Most are leftovers from the construction,” said Grace. “They’re only intended for one more ride.”

  We pulled up two of the bikes. At the airlock, Grace found a craft-hidden panel, which she opened to reveal an alphanumeric keypad. She entered the password, and the characters appeared in the display: “Platform_9.75.”

  “Cute,” I said, as one of airlock doors hissed open.

  “Whistling in the dark. This is a backdoor escape route for the spirituals of an entire nation, if the realm turns against us again.”

  The door open just enough to let us through, and we walked our bikes inside. Grace hit a hidden pad on the other side, and the door began to close behind us.

  “By the way,” said Grace, “when we entered here, we triggered a warning alarm in MI13. We have to reach the halfway point to escape England’s spiritual power. The maths on their response time should just work out, so I suggest we get moving.”

  We opened the next airlock door, closed it behind us, and rode into the service tunnel proper. “From here,” said Grace, “we need to go about twenty-eight kilometers to cross the spiritual border.” Initially, we biked on a slight decline, which was good, because whatever the amphetamine was doing for my head, my muscles were still at their limit.

  After some miles, the overhead lights were no longer lit, but the bikes had headlamps powered by our pedaling. Grace used some stealth to conceal us from an oncoming service vehicle, and like bike racers we had to ride up on the curve of the tunnel to get by.

  We rode together side by side. Almost nice, this biking holiday with an MI13 agent. Almost, until I started thinking again. My family background could really hinder me sometimes, because I didn’t realize what we were heading into, until it was too late.

  “This tunnel, for spiritual purposes, it’s a wound in the earth, right?”

  “Yes,” agreed Grace.

  “This is an Underworld place,” I continued.

  “Yes,” said Grace, a bit impatiently.

  “And a borderland,” I continued. “So, how many ghosts are we going to have to pass through?”

  Sure enough, first in ones or twos, the national ghosts became visible. Some were relatively recent, like World War II’s Old Home Guard. But some looked Napoleonic era—a long stretch of time for spirits, if I trusted more experienced viewers.

  Great, I thought, now I’m in that hippie-dippy Joseph Campbell’s pan-religionist gobbledygook. Sorry, Joe, but despite this Underworld detour, I don’t believe in heroes and heroes’ journeys. I wasn’t called to adventure; I was ordered on missions. I didn’t return with boons; I ran back as fast as I could, sometimes on fire.

  The UK national gho
sts didn’t trouble or even regard us; they kept their dead eyes focused ahead against any threat from the continent. But then I saw my first personal ghosts. Maybe it was my exhaustion plus the pill that allowed this deeper trip into the Underworld. Amphetamines weren’t the usual Left-Hand concoction for entering the realm of death, but here they were a sufficient gateway drug.

  Whatever death magic was happening, I saw not just my own ancestors, but what I took to be Grace’s as well. Abram was not among them, praise the Lord, so he must have been truly gone. My father’s spirit was driving his favorite red Corvette along the side of the tunnel. I saw plenty of him back home—but sitting next to him was Mom! She had died when I was a kid while on some mission saving missionaries. She smiled and waved at me, scarf blowing in the spectral breeze. Someday, could I call her back to the house? I’d been missing her my whole life.

  Our other ancestors rode horses or bicycles, or just ran along with us at unnatural speed. Other than my mom, my ancestors didn’t acknowledge me, but instead engaged in a ghost game of chicken with Grace’s ancestors, each riding or running in intertwining paths, staring at each other with angry grimaces. Their dead eyes were only alive with their hostility to each other.

  My ancestors were pissing me off. “Show respect, or by God, I’ll…” What, kill them again? Short of expulsion, I didn’t have enough experience with ghost discipline. It didn’t matter. My ancestors didn’t embarrass me by actually attacking. Grace just gave her ghosts a warning glance, and they kept themselves in check as well.

  “They really don’t like each other,” I said.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “What’s going on?” I pointed at a young man in a British redcoat uniform from the Revolution, the darkness of his skin still seeming incongruous with his clothing despite what I’d already learned. The redcoat was staring bayonets at a man dressed as a merchant sea captain whose face was all too familiar. “Who’s that soldier glaring at Stephen?”

  “Let’s keep riding,” Grace said.

  After a short while, she continued. “In 1764, your Stephen transported a cargo of African slaves to the New World. One of them was that man, my ancestor Toby Howe. As the Don said, during the Revolution he joined the British cause, and my family has served the Crown ever since. But for generations afterwards, Toby’s spirit described the horrors of the Middle Passage to his descendants. He only faded into our House when I was a child; I’m surprised to see him again, even in this place.”

  “Stephen was directly involved,” I said, just to acknowledge that I understood her import.

  “Yes,” she said, “but the Endicott craft lineage’s involvement with slavery didn’t begin or end with Stephen. Even after clear evidence of the dangerous relationship between slave ownership and evil craft, your ancestors continued to profit from the trade.”

  This was enough, far more than enough, to justify her contempt for my family. Yet the way she had said it sounded more like something on the surface, rather than fundamental. As evil as it was, the slave trade was a broad and pervasive sin (more so than most want to remember), and the anger of Grace and her family felt extremely focused. “That’s not all of it, is it?”

  “No, it isn’t.” Grace stared at the way ahead as she spoke. “I have another, earlier, practitioner ancestor—too long dead to appear even here. Her name was Tituba of Salem.”

  “Oh,” I said. Tituba, an enslaved woman, was one of the first people accused of witchcraft during the madness that afflicted Salem in 1692. The involvement of mundane Endicotts in the trials wasn’t particularly significant, but behind the scenes the Endicott spiritual lineage had some hand in the witch hunts. The exact extent of that involvement was still disputed—the Mortons claimed that we had directed the whole macabre circus to eliminate a few rival practitioners, while my Family’s historians argued that we only contributed to, at most, “one or two” of the executions.

  “Tituba survived,” I blurted out, not having anything better to say.

  “Yes, she survived. Your Puritan family was very fastidious about honoring its word, and they had promised Tituba that if she used her gifts as instructed and accused everyone that they told her to, she would be spared. So she accused, and accused, and accused, and she survived. But tell me, Major, as a recent convert to the reality of ghosts, what sort of spirits do you think haunted and hounded Tituba until the hour of her death and beyond?”

  We pedaled on in silence until I could think of anything that might be worth saying. I spoke with quiet uncertainty. “We’ve repented. I’ve repented.”

  “Whatever it is you’ve done in recompense, do you think it’s enough?”

  I didn’t hesitate. “No.”

  Grace turned her face from the path ahead and stared into my eyes. I didn’t dare blink or look away. Was she reading my sins like a Morton? Looking for deceit like the Don? Her own eyes remained beautiful, but again I saw sorrow, both recent and older than her life, and I hated myself for my part in it.

  As if from far away outside herself, she finally spoke. “In you, I see hope. I’d rather not. But my duty is first to keep us alive and moving. So ride on, Endicott.”

  * * *

  The air grew muggy, and concrete dust motes fell in our headlight beams. With a deep rumble, a train passed in one of the rail tunnels. Eventually, the service path curved and curved back. “That’s where the crossover chamber is,” said Grace. “Maybe another eleven kilometers to the true border.” The bicycles lacked odometers, but I knew we must have been approaching the edge of Britain, because in the twilight ahead of us hovered the spirit of that damned crazy oracle Sphinx. Dressed in her same aging hippie best that she was wearing when she died, Sphinx moved toward me like a silent film image, and then she was past me, and I heard her voice just over my left shoulder. “You’re going the wrong way.”

  I turned my head right and left to check behind me, but Sphinx wasn’t there, which meant she was in my head as a possessing spirit. Before, that would have been an intolerable evil to be met with the Lord’s full artillery of prayer and imprecation. Now, it was a minor annoyance in one of my longest days. Under my straining breath, I told her, “You’re a little late.”

  “Probably doesn’t matter. Mate in four moves.” Then she cackled.

  “Is that a warning or a how-to book?”

  “Oo, you’re better at this now. Both, neither—you’ve got more timelines springing from this moment than Lee at Gettysburg, though most of them don’t end well.”

  “Meaning I’m free?”

  Inside my mind, an eye winked at me. “Right, like oracles and neo-Calvinists believe in that crap. But yeah, as free as we get. Good luck, or Godspeed, or whatever—all the same to me now.” With that, her spirit fluttered out of my head.

  Even as Sphinx was departing, Grace said, “Stop,” and signaled for silence. Far behind us, I distinguished a sound that had grown unconsciously familiar in the background.

  From a sleeve of the fur coat she had strapped behind her on her bike, Grace pulled out and extended what looked like a small antique nautical telescope. After looking down the service tunnel, she wordlessly handed it to me.

  I looked. It was actually a night vision monocular with range-finding capability.

  “I may have erred slightly,” Grace said.

  At the limits of my vision, a vehicle was moving toward us, rapidly. I heard no echo of motor noise, so it must have been electric. The vehicle filled the lower part of the tunnel. Even if they failed to shoot us, they could run us down and crush us.

  Grace pointed ahead of us—a wall of spiritual energy. “There’s the true border. I believe they’ll be stopped there, though it’ll be closer than I would have liked. Let’s go.”

  Even as she spoke, a craft-concealed door at least as massive as the airlocks we’d passed through became visible and began to swing close.

  We pedaled furiously the last couple of hundred yards. Grace was shouting. “Hold that door!” But long before w
e reached it, the door completely shut against us.

  We skidded to a stop at the midway point. Here, screened from mundane view, a half-dozen skeletons were chained to the walls as warding warnings to would-be trespassers and invaders. One of the skeletons was in tattered SS garb, which seemed anachronistic for a tunnel from the ’90s and yet utterly appropriate.

  A line of French soldier ghosts stood shoulder to shoulder guarding the door. One of these soldiers was a faded veteran of Napoleon, while a more sharply defined spirit wore the uniform of the modern Foreign Legion. An apparent civilian was also with them—a woman in a red cap who sat on a spectral stool in front of the line, completely focused on her knitting. Something about her presence didn’t bode well.

  Grace had murder redux in her eyes as she spoke to the French ghosts. “I invoke the compact. Let me open this door.” The ghosts shook their heads. Grace was incredulous. “The French are deliberately barring our way.”

  “I thought…”

  “Yes, it’s in the compact that this is an open escape route in both directions. There’s only one possible justification for barring us. They must think the UK has been corrupted, and that we carry the contagion.”

  The vehicle was approaching; they’d probably start shooting soon. Without much hope, I pleaded with the French spirits. “I’m an American. An ally.”

  Some of the French ghosts gave a Gallic shrug. I should’ve known, but still—so many American craftsmen had died on their soil, and that was the best they could do?

  No use trying to open the door anymore—our pursuers were too close. I drew my sword from its sheath. “I assume they’ve sent enough to beat us,” I said.

  “That would be the usual protocol,” noted Grace.

  “You could shoot me,” I said, “maybe even without killing me. Then they’ll give you time to explain. You could end the rot.”

  “You’re not one of your service’s intellectuals, are you?”

  “A simple ‘no’ would do,” I said.

  The hostile vehicle slowed, and the passengers started firing at us. At this distance, their shots were easily skewed, though the bounces were so chaotic as to be dangerous.