Celia bit her lips and turned to look out the window.
“So you see, dear, I do have one or two things on my mind at the moment.”
“Mom … Dad…” Manny Frazer came groggily awake. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong dear, we’re home. And you, young woman…”
“I know,” she smiled, “straight to bed. You’ll get no argument from me. I really need to get some sleep.”
“You slept in the hospital,” Celia said.
“It wasn’t good sleep,” Manny said quietly.
“Why not?” Jonathan asked.
“Filled with nightmares.”
40
IT WAS great to be home. Manny walked around her room, drawing strength from its peaceful familiarity. Jesus, but that hospital—even though she’d been in a private room and all that—it had been grim. And the bed; that bed was unbelievable. And she couldn’t get the idea out of her head that other people had slept in that bed, that they had died in that bed. That had been her one abiding thought in the hospital during her lucid hours. She’d been troubled by extraordinary nightmares in which she actually heard the voices of those who had passed away in that room, crying out to her, calling her name, begging her to help them, to ease their suffering, to help, to help them, to helptohelptohelptohelptohelphelphelphelp …
She could rationalize it away; she was tired, distressed, filled with sedatives and she’d just seen her first dead body, or what was left of it. Robert had been her friend, her lover. It was only natural she’d think of death, especially now, in a hospital, but the dreams had been frightening.
She needed a shower and bed and in that order. Stepping into the large en suite bathroom, she undressed quickly and dumped her clothes into the tall wicker basket. They stank of the hospital, and she imagined she could smell the same sharp odor of chemicals and disinfectant from her own skin. Stepping into the shower, she turned it up as hot as she could bear and allowed the water to run off her shaven head and down onto her body. Rotating her head, she could feel the knotted muscles in the shoulders and at the back of her neck finally relaxing. She scrubbed at herself with a harsh sponge, bringing the blood flushing to her skin …
… the rasp of pumice stone against her skin, across her sensitive breasts …
… and then rubbed in supposedly odorless shower gel, but the air was abruptly flooded with the sickly sweet scent of a heavy perfume.
Manny stopped, head tilted back, smelling the moist air. What was that smell? Like dead flowers or beeswax.
A cold wind suddenly wafted across her moist body, as if a door had been opened, and she shivered. She peered through the frosted glass door of the shower, trying to see if she’d left the bedroom door open, but she could see nothing. She blinked moisture from her eyes and rubbed at the glass door …
… a tall, red-haired, red-bearded man, cruel faced, green eyed, in a heavy snow-capped cloak …
The scream caught in her throat, and she floundered backwards against the icy tiles, hands automatically covering her breasts and groin. The figure seemed to be looking directly at her through the glass, his mouth opening and closing as if he spoke. Water splashed into her eyes and she blinked rapidly. When she could see clearly again, he had gone.
Manny flung open the door and stared wide-eyed out into the empty bathroom. The door leading into the bedroom was still locked, the bolt thrown across from the inside.
Hallucinations … the residue of drugs in her system.
Shivering almost uncontrollably now, she staggered from the shower and wrapped herself in a thick chenille bathrobe, rubbing at her head with a towel, hearing the lengthening hair rasp against the cloth. She opened the door and stared out into the bedroom, feeling like a child checking for the bogyman beneath the bed. Three quick strides and she jumped in, and scrambled beneath the covers, only tossing away the dressing gown when she was safely tucked in. She snuggled down beneath the duvet, luxuriating in the feel of the fabric against her naked skin. She was tired … overtired. That was all. A good night’s sleep was what she …
* * *
MANNY AWOKE ONCE during the night, and that was close to two in the morning. Moonlight streamed in through the window, the harsh light turning her skin alabaster. Eyes blinked open, and they were featureless silver discs, then she turned over and closed her eyes against the glare.
And her dreams were terrifying.
41
JONATHAN FRAZER settled back against the chaise longue, folded his arms across his chest and stared at the mirror. This time he knew what he was doing. This time he was conducting an experiment.
Twice before he had experienced something in front of this mirror, he had dreamt dreams, seen images, learned something—clues perhaps—to the mirror’s past. This time he had come prepared.
He had positioned a camcorder on a tripod directly behind the chaise longue facing the mirror, and he had set it to shoot one frame every five minutes. A digital voice recorder was on the floor beside the mirror. It was voice activated and would start recording as soon as it heard sounds. His Canon digital camera lay on the chair beside him.
Tonight he would have some answers. And proof. Tonight, he would have proof.
But proof of what…?
42
“SHE IS magnificent,” the tall gray-haired, gray-eyed man agreed, turning to look at the woman.
“And she desires you, lord,” Edward Kelley said eagerly in a thick brogue. Gone was his previous air of authority and learning; now he was nothing more than an Irish servant, fawning, ignorant, and ill-educated.
They were sitting in a smoky tavern on a side street just off London Bridge—the bridge that was much frequented by alchemists and others who dabbled in science and the occult. It was often used as a meeting place by those wishing to join a Circle or by a master looking for a servant with arcane knowledge. Doctor John Dee had met Edward Kelley here, four years previously, in 1569. Dee’s previous assistant, Barnabas Saul, had turned out to be nothing more than a charlatan, foisted on Dee by his enemies, jealous of his privileged position with the Queen. Saul had promised much and delivered nothing, and come close to destroying the doctor’s reputation in the process.
Dee considered himself fortunate indeed in stumbling upon Kelley, an itinerant Irishman fleeing the grinding poverty in his homeland with nothing to his name except some skill as a medium. The Irishman had been hoping to find his fortune in the big city, but had found a similar poverty in London. But London—inhabited by some of the brightest and most dangerous men of the age—had something which Ireland had not: opportunity. Kelley’s natural talent as a medium and scryer, enhanced by some less scrupulous additions, soon attracted the attention of several of the city’s wealthiest men and women. Within six months of arriving in the city, he had become Doctor John Dee’s assistant, and very quickly an integral part of Dee’s life and work. The man’s knowledge of the occult was extraordinary, far surpassing Dee’s, although curiously, this knowledge was only in evidence when Kelley was in a trance, under the influence of his spirits.
“Tell me about her,” Dee said, glancing sidelong at the woman again. It was not unusual to find beautiful women in this tavern, though women of such beauty and presence were certainly rare indeed.
“She is a natural talent, neither witch nor sorceress, a practitioner of some natural magic. Look at her, lord; tell me her age,” Kelley urged him.
Dee looked at the woman again, and then shook his head. “Hair is without silver or gray, skin smooth and unpoxed, a full set of teeth. One-and-twenty, two-and-twenty?”
“She was born in 1491, the same year Henry VIII, the queen’s father, was born.”
Dee looked at the woman in astonishment. Why, that would make her eighty-two! He turned to look at Kelley, his thin eyebrows raised in a silent question. The red-haired man nodded. “Kept young by her magic. Ever young. Perhaps immortal.”
“And she wants to speak to me?” Dee sounded almost surprised.
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Edward Kelley lowered his eyes. “You have a reputation, master. That has drawn her to you.”
“I’ll speak to her, of course,” Doctor John Dee said decisively.
“But not here, master. Too many eyes, too many ears.”
Dee nodded. He trod a particularly dangerous path; he was a known occultist close to the queen, he had prepared the horoscope that had shown that the young princess, Elizabeth, would indeed be queen and had then prepared the horoscope which decided upon the most auspicious day for the coronation. Although his travels in Europe had discovered much that had been of military or economic use to the queen’s advisors, he had also made many enemies, and the church especially despised him, labeling him a practitioner of black magic and a heretic. He was in little danger while the queen still lived, but should anything happen to her, then his position could turn quickly perilous. And there were always those eager to report his every movement to Elizabeth’s enemies, looking for signs of weakness, trying to blacken his name.
John Dee made his way through the crowded room and stepped out into the street, pulling his cloak up around his shoulders. The night was bitterly cold, the frigid air tainted with the stench of the streets and the pungent effluence from the river. He lived in Mortlake, a village on the edge of London and so was particularly conscious of the difference in the air of the city and the country, but he knew that Londoners were rarely aware of the stench of their own city.
Kelley came out a few moments later, with the woman following close behind.
Sensitive to odors, Dee caught the scents of herbs and spices from her, expensive bath oils sweetening the foul night air. She had pulled up the hood of her heavy cloak and now the oval of her face stared at him from shadow, her eyes huge and dark against her pale face.
“I am Doctor John Dee,” he said formally.
The woman curtsied before him, but did not extend her hand and did not proffer her own name. Dee glanced at his assistant, but Kelley shook his head slightly, warning him to say nothing.
“You have an interest in Natural Magic,” she said suddenly. Surprisingly, her voice was uneducated, her accent placing her somewhere to the north of the Thames.
“I am used to dealing with people with names,” Dee said shortly.
“Names are symbols with which we chain others; the knowledge of names grants power.”
“That is a superstition and applies only to magical names. To know a person’s magical name is to have power over that person.”
“Untrue. A name—any name—conjures the image of that person. Knowledge of the name—any name, be it true or false, so long as it is used consistently to represent that person—grants power.”
Dee bowed slightly, conceding the point. Her accent may be that of an uneducated woman, but her knowledge was evidence of learning and education, and that was a privilege of the wealthy.
“You have an interest in Natural Magic,” she repeated.
John Dee smiled. “I have.” He nodded to Kelley. “My assistant tells me you were born in 1491.”
“It is true. On the first day of the autumn equinox of that year.”
“And you have preserved your youth through this Natural Magic?” Dee asked, keeping his voice carefully neutral. As an alchemist, he had heard of the Philosopher’s Stone, the magical formula which granted eternal life to the user.
The woman looked up suddenly. “We should not talk here. Follow me.” She turned and walked away, her wooden heels clicking loudly on the few pieces of paving that still remained this close to the river. Dee looked at Kelley and shrugged. The doctor touched the knife on his belt and he was relieved to find that Kelley was wearing his sword. This was a particularly unsavory part of London.
The woman led them down through the warren of side streets and alleys running parallel to the docks. Rats scurried across their path, huge creatures that could easily be confused with a cat or a dog. Dee was horrified to discover that even though it was after midnight on a bitterly cold winter’s night, there were still women and children on the streets, begging and selling themselves for the price of a meal. If he could truly discover the Elixir of Life then surely he should be able to put it to some use to ease man’s suffering?
He was becoming nervous now. They were in the heart of the docklands, a vicious, no man’s land, where even the Watch rarely ventured. He clutched at Kelley’s arm. “Where are we going?”
“She has some sort of base close by,” he said carefully. “Her Natural Magic draws its power from the river.”
Dee nodded, not completely satisfied with the answer. His every instinct warned him of danger, but his desire for knowledge, his thirst for information, was greater.
They stopped outside a rotting wharfside store and the woman produced a brightly shining key from the depths of her cloak. The key turned easily in the lock and she stepped into the darkness. After a moment’s hesitation, Dee and Kelley followed her.
Flesh touched his, and Dee stifled a shout as he recognized the woman’s hand on his, her soft fingers wrapping around his wrist pulling him forward. Kelley’s heavy hand dropped onto his shoulder as they moved into the darkness. He wondered how she could see in the dark, and supposed that it might be a side effect of her Natural Magic; perhaps the senses grew more finely tuned as one aged, rather than degenerating as they did at present.
Or perhaps she was a demon leading him to hell.
They moved down into the bowels of the rotten building. The smell of decay, or ordure and corruption, was stronger now, and there was a ripe dampness in the air that caught at the back of his throat, eased its way into his lungs. Still in total darkness, the nameless woman led them across an echoing chamber, boots splashing through water that had been long stagnant by the smell it exuded.
And then there was light.
Dee didn’t realize he was holding his breath until they reached the lighted chamber, and then he took a great sobbing breath that he turned into a cough.
The room was set up as an alchemical studio, a long table laden down with instruments occupying one wall, a broken chair beside a rough cot in the corner. There was a second, completely bare wooden table shoved up against another wall.
But the room was dominated by the mirror.
The woman walked into the center of the chamber and threw off her cloak, while Kelley took up a position at the door, arms folded across his chest. Dee walked up to the mirror, mesmerized by its size: he had never seen a glass so big.
“Do not stare into its depths,” the woman advised.
Dee immediately whirled around. “Why not?”
Her lips moved in a smile. “It has certain … properties.”
“Properties?”
“Properly activated it can be used as a scrying glass for example,” she said, repeating the words Kelley had tutored her in earlier.
Dee turned to look at the glass again. Scrying—the ability to see the future in a glass—had always been one of his especial interests. “And how does one activate it?” he asked, running his long fingers along the smooth wooden frame. Yet again, he cursed his lack of any Talent or Ability. He glanced over at Kelley, wondering why he didn’t approach the glass. Did he know something, did he see something with his second sight that disturbed him? “How does one activate the glass?” he repeated when the woman didn’t answer him. He glanced over his shoulder—and stopped.
The woman was naked.
She looked at him, lifting her arms, running both hands through her thick black hair, exposing herself to him. “Blood will bring it to life,” she said, “clean blood, with the proper incantation from the Key of Solomon. Semen too, will enliven it. Seed and blood, the building blocks of all life.”
Dee turned from the woman and stared at the mirror again, watching it from the corner of his eyes, his agile mind evaluating these snippets of knowledge. He had heard of such glasses—though never on such a scale before—and they too had to be fed with the body’s sacred fluids, blood, semen, or tears. But
once fired they showed many, many wondrous things, the future, the past, Heaven, Hell.
“But we did not come here to discuss the glass,” she continued, “we came here to discuss Natural Magic.”
Dee dragged his gaze away from the mirror and turned back to the woman. She was now wearing a blood-red cloak over her nakedness, though the cloak hung open down the middle, and he found the tantalizing glimpse of flesh even more arousing than the sight of her fully nude.
“Natural Magic,” the woman said, walking past the man to stand with her back to the mirror, hands on her hips. “We are all of us vessels of power, repositories of magical energy. But few realize that, and fewer still can tap the unlimited power of their own bodies.”
Dee nodded slowly. His own theories ran very much along these lines.
“I have developed a system of Natural Magic that can access the unlimited power of the human body,” she continued, her large dark eyes now locked on Dee’s face. As she spoke, her right hand had moved off her rounded hip bone and slid into the dark patch between her legs. “This is the oldest magic in the world,” the woman continued, her fingers moving, probing, “sacred in some parts of the world, shunned in others. The druids knew of its power and the witches, their successors, knew a little also. The Egyptians knew the secret of this special magic, and we know the savages conduct their ceremonies naked.”
Mirror Image Page 15
