** ** **
McTell threw himself up the cellar stairs, fell, lurched to his feet, and slammed the door against the horror behind him. He ran through the awful dark silence of the house and at last burst out into the night. There he raised his hands to the silhouetted, mist-shrouded ruin, clutching the empty dank air. The cry that came from him was wordless, a long howl echoed by mocking laughter inside. The linden’s solitude brings understanding to the pilgrim. Slowly, he let his hands fall. There was only the creak of branches, the faraway moaning of wind through the canyons, the moon dancing behind the heavy, swift clouds.
“All right,” he whispered hoarsely. “All right, then.”
He jerked open the door and strode back down the hall. In the kitchen he gripped a fistful of candles, lit them together, and, holding them before him like a torch, climbed to his study. The grimoire lay where he had left it on his desk, inert, evil. Without pausing, he picked it up and shook it open.
“This is the end of you,” he said through clenched teeth, and thrust the flaming candles to the pages.
A flash of agony wrung a cry from him. He staggered back, flapping his arm. It felt as if his flesh were being ripped away with red-hot pincers. The vision in his left eye went black. A knife blade seemed to be scraping the depths of the socket. The pain surged until he thought his heart would explode. Frantically, knees giving out, he dropped the book and slapped at it, smothering the flames with his bare hands.
The pain began to subside. Trembling, he gathered the scattered candles and limped to the bookshelf. He stuffed them into a highball glass, then got hold of the Scotch decanter. The warm liquor made him gag. Vision began to filter back into his eye. The book lay on the floor, with the bottom corners of a dozen pages charred. An evil-smelling dark smoke hung in the air.
The burning sensation was mounting again in his hand—from putting out the fire, he thought at first. But it continued, harsh and stinging, and he suddenly realized what it was. Shaking his head and muttering, “No, no,” he backed away. A burning flash shot up his arm, making him gasp.
Slowly, with tears in his eyes and dread in his heart, he knelt, picked up the book, turned to the page. In the flickering candlelight he could just make out the words: Sanguis lilii viam terminat.
The blood of the lily brings the pilgrimage to its end.
From inside his mind, and yet somehow not from him at all, comprehension began to dawn. He watched with horrified fascination as his hands moved almost of their own will, paging through the translation until he came to the ritual, the murder of the peasant girl by her father, that had so puzzled him.
It puzzled him no longer.
He raised his face, understanding that he had no need of the translation after all—that in spite of the passage of centuries, he remembered the ceremony in all its details with perfect clarity. He had rehearsed it against just this contingency.
Most important, the words of the secret incantation, which had been wrested from that unmapped city by only a few, were beginning to whisper themselves in his brain in a language men had never spoken.
A sound at the doorway made him turn. Alysse was standing in it, wearing a lacy black slip, looking as calm as if she had just arrived for a day’s work.
He turned back to the window. The clouds had parted. On a knoll beneath the ruin, two figures stood clearly silhouetted, one tall, one short.
John McTell picked up the grimoire and walked with it to the candles. He held it poised over the flame, inches away, already feeling the pain creeping through his limbs. An instant of courage, a few minutes of agony, and the pilgrimage would be truly at an end.
His hand faltered and then, still holding the book, dropped to his side. He would need fire and one more thing, which he would find in the kitchen.
In his arms Alysse was soft and warm as a kitten, seeming to weigh nothing. He carried her out the door and down the dark stairway. His strength was boundless.
But as he walked, a vast empty sadness touched his fading heart at the taunting inner whisper of that other voice, driving home the final nail: She had never really been his, had not given herself to him of her own free will. He had allowed himself to be cheated even out of the one thing he had truly desired.
** ** **
“Perhaps we should wait in the car,” Melusine said as they turned into the drive. “That way it won’t seem quite so much like a storm-trooper attack.”
Boudrie was about to agree when the Citroen’s headlights flashed on the McTells’ BMW. The driver’s door hung open like a broken wing. Behind it the house was dark. Devarre cut the engine.
“Someone was in a terrible hurry,” Boudrie muttered.
“Drunk, perhaps,” said Devarre. He flicked on a flashlight. The BMW’s keys were still in the ignition. They exchanged glances and walked on to the house.
The heavy wooden door was wide open. Boudrie knocked loudly, the sound echoing through the emptiness inside. Melusine was shaking her head. “There’s no one.”
Boudrie turned to them, about to say, “Is this where we turn from mere rudeness to breaking and entering?” But Melusine was already pushing past him, limping inside.
“Can you feel it?” she whispered. Her voice was chilled, and Boudrie’s scalp prickled as he stepped through the door. His groping hand found the light switch, flicked it without result.
“Odd,” Devarre said, holding the flashlight beam on it. “The same thing happened the night I was called.”
Melusine was ahead of them. Her voice rang through the stillness: “Madame? Monsieur?” The flashlight played around the kitchen, came to rest on a box of candles that had been roughly torn open. Eoudrie picked up two, lit them, and, with one in each hand, walked back to the living room. Melusine was standing in its center. Nothing they could see in the dim light seemed out of order. In unspoken agreement, they started up the stairs. Devarre, walking and turning like a guard, brought up the rear. Something glinted in his other hand; Boudrie realized with distracted astonishment that it was a pistol.
They worked their way down the hall opening doors; paused at the sight of the half-packed suitcases in the master suite; then came to the study. A cluster of candles in a drinking glass guttered on a shelf. Boudrie stepped to the scattered papers on the desk, in the slender hope that a note or letter might provide a clue. While Devarre held the flashlight, he bent close and began to read the ufamiliar English. It was quickly apparent that the typewritten pages were a translation of another text, and a very strange, sinister one: an account of some sort of ritualistic blood sacrifice. Madness, yes, but there was a tone to the writing that was deliberate, authoritative, frightening.
What in the name of God had McTell been doing with something like this?
Boudrie forced himself to read faster, hands tightening on the edge of the desk.
Melusine spoke so abruptly he jumped: “But that’s him!” She was pointing in disbelief at a photograph on a shelf, dimly visible in the candle flame. She pulled the flashlight from her husband’s hand and shined the beam on it. Boudrie recognized the couple immediately: McTell and his wife, posed in front of what looked like a chateau of the
Loire. He looked austere, dignified—the eminent man of letters. His wife was smiling confidently.
“The other man in my dream tonight,” Melusine whispered. “The one who was holding the knife.”
It came to him with a jolt that dropped his jaw:
Item, that he ascribed to the pagan belief of Hermes Trismegistus, that the spirit of the mage need not die, but could move from shape to shape at will; and that furthermore, if the accident of death should overtake his body, his spirit could gain another by means of a secret ritual. Such was the wickedness of this man, he was heard to declare that by causing some mortal to slay that which he loved most, the mage could then have that mortal in his power forever.
Sins of the fathers.
Blood of a flower.
“Alysse,” he hissed.
Was
that the form McTell’s strange longing had taken: an obsession with a teenaged girl?
Never dreaming that he himself was being seduced in a far more profound and sinister way.
Boudrie turned to Melusine. “Madame,” he said, forcing his voice to stay soft, “if an evil spirit were bent upon something besides causing mischief, what would it be?”
“A body,” she said without hesitation. “It was my great-aunt who taught me that. Bad spirits suffer unendingly in their realm. They freeze, they burn, they are tormented by other spirits. This is the reason for possession. They wish to flee their torments, to enjoy again the warm things of life. But only the very strongest can effect it.”
Boudrie strode to the window and stared out at the wind-tossed clouds. The moon danced behind them like a wanton harlot. The bleak silhouette of the ruin stared back as if in defiance. I have stood for twelve centuries, it seemed to say, my stones have been soaked a thousand times in blood. Do you come to challenge me?
“Unthinkable,” Boudrie whispered.
He spun away and met Melusine’s eyes, dark with anxiety.
“You must tell us what you know, monsieur,” she said. “You must have help.”
“There is no time,” he said, already moving toward the door.
Her hand caught his arm. He paused and met her eyes. The fear he saw in them touched his own heart, cold as twisting steel. But badly though I have lived, he thought, that life is past. This remains. He said, “I grow old, madame. I will never be stronger.”
“But if you fail . . .”
Etien Boudrie smiled grimly and spoke words that would echo in her memory many times: “Perhaps the early casualties in any battle are really the lucky ones.”
“I’m sorry to always be the slow pupil,” Devarre said in exasperation, “but fail at what?”
“No time,” Boudrie said. He pushed past, gathering speed like a train.
“But where are you going?”
“No time!”
He took the stairs in jolting, jarring leaps, landed breathless at the bottom, lunged for the door. Behind him he heard Devarre yell, “Damn it, Etien, wait!”
Then Boudrie was outside, running into the night. May you be forgiven, Monsieur McTell, for what you have done, he thought. He plunged on, straining to pierce the darkness, vaguely aware of Devarre shouting again.
When he crashed through the brush onto the old road to the ruin, he paused, panting. The heavy sky distorted the moon’s shape. Windy whispers of night closed around him—like voices, he realized with dread, that he could almost understand.
He forced his heavy body into motion again, and as he lurched up the hill, he realized fleetingly that both Henri and Philippe Taillou were dead, and that he, Etien Boudrie, had told no one else about the secret of the hidden spring, whose breaching to fill a swimming pool had unleashed this wave of horror.
CHAPTER 15
Roger Devarre stalked angrily back into the house. “He disappeared before I could catch him,” he said. “I wouldn’t have believed he was so fast. He went charging into the brush like a mad bull.”
She said nothing. She had limped downstairs after the running men, holding candles, silently watching.
“Do you know what he’s doing?” Devarre said.
“Not the specifics, but in essence.” The decision was a terrible one, the worst she had ever had to make; but there was no doubt. “You must go after him.”
Devarre blinked.
“I don’t like it either,” she said.
“Let me get this straight,” he said slowly. “You think there is some sort of evil influence at work that has something to do with those papers we found, that has led McTell and Alysse to climb that mountain in the middle of the night—”
“Christ,” she said impatiently. “Can’t you see what’s right in front of you?” She saw hurt come into his face, went to him, touched him. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m frightened.”
“I can only judge from what I know.”
“But can’t you believe me when I tell you I know some things too? Do you think Etien is mad, or playing some game? Do you think I did this to myself?” She pulled his hand to her bandaged flank.
He exhaled and shook his head. “Forgive me,” he murmured.
“Now, you must hurry. Fighting spirits is a priest’s work, but the man may be physically dangerous as well.”
“One more question. Is Etien really going to perform some sort of—exorcism?” The word came awkwardly from his mouth.
“Whatever it was he realized, he didn’t say. Something he saw in those papers. But I think, when he said, ‘Alysse’—don’t you remember that when I asked the spirit what it wanted, it said, ‘Blood of a flower’?”
“Good God!”
“That was what I was seeing in my dream tonight, I’m sure of it. But hurry! Can you find your way all right?”
“I’m not looking forward to it, but I’ll manage. I crawled through plenty of brush in the army.” In the doorway he turned. “I can’t stand the thought of leaving you here alone.”
“Whatever is going to happen will happen up there,” she said, trying to believe her own words. “I’d go with you, but my leg—”
“At least let me find the fuse box and get you some lights.”
She shook her head firmly. “Every second matters.” Eyes full of anxiety, he kissed her and stepped out into the night.
She watched until his figure blended with the thick tangle of shadows. Immediately she wanted more light. She walked to the kitchen, lit several candles, and set them in dishes. It was then that she noticed the purse sitting on the counter. She turned it up and emptied it. Keys, cigarettes, several hundred francs, and a pack of playing cards fell out. There was also a wallet containing a passport. The photo was of Linden Anne Sumner McTell, a little younger, but unmistakably the same woman as in the picture upstairs in the study.
Melusine stood holding it, turning slowly, searching the dim smoky air with her eyes. Suitcases on the bed, halfpacked with a woman’s clothes, and now this. In the confusion, none of them had thought to wonder about the wife. The sense of aloneness, of wrongness, rose sharply, pressing in around her like the dark.
Her moving gaze settled on something else that seemed out of place. A wooden holder for a graded set of fine Solingen carving knives had been thrown down carelessly. Two or three of the knives were partly displaced, and one of the larger ones was missing.
The sight suddenly brought back the memory of the knife in her own hand that had seemed to turn into a snake; and she remembered, too, what had been in her mind at that instant: a vow to protect Alysse.
As if you were its enemy.
She shivered, folded her arms, began to pace. There was nothing to do but wait.
** ** **
Boudrie panted along at his rolling, lumbering trot, his thoughts half in his head, half-mumbled under his gasping breath.
The riddle was answered.
His body cried for rest, but he fought off the urge to turn back, to sink into blissful oblivion and never be forced to touch this monstrousness.
And what drove him on was not just the certainty that, if he failed, Courdeval would destroy Alysse, and Melusine, and himself, and God only knew who else. It was not even that this wickedest of men would again walk the earth—unknown, and free to move from shape to shape as others changed suits of clothes. It was understanding that in a direct and terrible way, he, Etien Boudrie, was responsible: that the life of the innocent Alysse was in jeopardy because her father had been a weak and sinful man, a priest who had broken his sacred vow. For I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generation. And as he panted along, it seemed to Boudrie that a single word loomed before his mind’s eye as if it were carved in immense blocks of stone, set against a horizonless landscape of twilight: RETRIBUTION. He tried to forget that any hope, if there was any, rested in the body of a fat old priest run
ning up a mountain at night.
When at last he reached the lip of the ravine that guarded the fortress, his breath was coming so hard it was almost a shriek. His legs ached as if wedges had been driven into the bones. Fifty meters beyond lay the ruin’s outer wall. There was no sound, no movement, except the writhing sea of thick black brush below, like a wall of night sprung up to defy the elusive moon. Sweating, staring, he stood fearful that he was about to deliver himself into the hands, not of an enemy, but of The Enemy. I cannot, he thought. I am no longer a young man.
He plunged down into the brush.
The crossing seemed to take hours. He stumbled, caught and released branches, only to have them whip across his face; he fell to a hand and knee when a root clutched at his ankle. He clung to the pain and fear, drove himself with them, lashed out ferociously at the grasping branches. When he dragged himself over the top, he was cut, bruised, exhausted, half-mad.
“Alysse!” he called hoarsely. Wind tore the sound from his lips, whirled it away into the rushing, whispering darkness. Suddenly enraged, he flailed at the empty air. “Alysse!”
Then a light-colored blur was moving swiftly toward him. Hope leaped in his heart—she was unharmed! As she came closer, he could see the dark cloud of hair, the white flowing gown. He stumbled forward, hands outstretched, nearly weeping with relief. “Alysse, my child—”
He stopped, stupefied. It was not Alysse.
It was Celeste. The Celeste he had known so many years before. A mist swirled in his brain as she drew near, long hair tossing, eyes imploring.
“Etien,” she called, and the youth in her voice sprang loose a thousand memories he had kept firmly bolted in an unused compartment of his heart. Images whirled before him in a kaleidoscope of sight, scent, sensation: soft skin, liquid warmth, whispers and sighs. This woman who had been so outwardly prim—God, what passion, what abandon in her bed! Her voice came to him as from a vast distance: “Do you not remember how I could make you roar as if your heart would burst?” His hands dropped to his sides, strength flowed from him like blood in a warm bath, and tears spilled from his eyes as he gazed into the face that had been, for him, the essence of love. Her fingers opened her gown and let it fall. His hands touched her breasts; her lips drew near, her eyes were shy but hungry—
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