The Cornerstone

by Anne C. Petty

  The basement was utterly still, the tiles on which he lay cold as a glacier. Seconds turned to minutes…it was as if the stone had gone dead. Bayard allowed a thicker stream from the thermos to coat the surface.

  “Was my question not stated clearly enough?” He might have the patience of that fool Job, but it would do him no good if the banshee refused to cooperate. She was bound to serve the master of the stone, to suspend his death and preserve his life, but she did not have to make it easy.

  Aye, we heard thee. Silence followed.

  She was becoming more recalcitrant lately, and that was the main query that he needed resolved. When she was in this mood, he would have to cajole, and if that failed, threaten. He bathed the stone again.

  “I was told by the previous master of the buachloch, the great magister John Dee, that if I desired, I could speak with shades whose souls have been claimed by the lord of the underworld…is this indeed true?”

  Screechy laughter filled the basement cavern and ricocheted off its hard planes and surfaces.

  Who would ye wish to bespeak, yer worship? Great Lucifer himself? Or perhaps a lesser demon who will most certainly attempt to deceive ye.

  Bayard waited for the laughter to subside. “I would bid Doctor John Dee himself appear before me.” A long silence ensued as he lay unmoving, head under the stairs, right arm angled in to reach the stone with the thermos spout. A faint scent of smoke came to his nostrils. Was she going to burn the building down around his ears? Not likely. Who else would she get to bring her offerings of blood and souls?

  He poured the remainder of the thermos over the stone. “I command the bain-sídhe to bring me the shade of John Dee!”

  Smoke filled his eyes and lungs and he jerked back, banging his head on the stair risers. Before he could even utter the most choice sixteenth-century oath he could remember, a loud crack shook the basement and popped his eardrums. On his hands and knees, Bayard stared into the gloom and then caught his breath. Stretching full across the basement floor, from one end to the other, was a foot-wide crack.

  He scrambled to his feet, ignoring the painful bump swelling at the back of his skull. Smoke burned his eyes and coated his tongue. He coughed violently, as the building trembled around him. He half expected to see the cliché of fire and brimstone wafting up from the crack, but that wasn’t happening. Instead, the actual air in front of him split. Bayard rubbed his hand over his eyes, but the image held. A vertical line nearly as tall as the ceiling formed and hung right in front of him. Slowly it widened as if the fabric of reality that was the Janus Theater on a city street in a southern metropolis were slowly being ripped apart. Bayard began to shake—into the rift he saw only void, flat black with no light or shadow…only the soul-freezing cold of empty space.

  But within the gradually widening rip in his universe, something was coalescing, a vague form materializing at the center of the gap. A man-shaped figure.

  A second deafening boom shook the building. The support pylons groaned and debris fell from the ceiling—Bayard feared for a moment the theater might come down on top of him. The rift in space-time had disappeared, but a tall, bearded man stood where it had been. A tight black skullcap covered his head from his hairline down to the nape of his neck. His beard and mustache were white with streaks of gray, the manicured beard reaching halfway down his chest and tapering to a point. His heavy black scholar’s robes were cut in the style of a Cambridge don. Staring down the length of a long straight nose, his dark eyes raked the face of his summoner.

  “Fie!” Bayard’s voice was a croak. His vocal cords had forgotten how to function.

  “I am come, as I was bidden.” The voice sent icicles forming along the rafters.

  Bayard took a step forward. “Is it really you?” The specter looked for all the world like the scholar and alchemist who’d somehow duped him into trading his immortal soul for the promise of suspended death. But he knew well that the minions of Hades were devious, and perhaps this was not the person he sought at all.

  Shivering like a plague victim, Bayard faced his unwelcome patron. “D-do you remember me?”

  “I ne’er thought to return to this realm,” said the icy voice. “What wouldst thou of me, sweet Marlowe, that I am untimely plucked out of oblivion?”

  Bayard’s throat constricted. It was the man he knew, no doubt. How to voice his apprehensions without making it sound as if he’d lost all control over the banshee? In a flush of anger he’d bent her to his will, but hadn’t thought out how to articulate his queries if she could actually bring Dee to him. He’d seen unfathomable things since he’d given up his mortality, but some small corner of his once-human mind chattered in terror at this apparition from beyond the grave.

  The sepulchral voice continued. “By human reckoning, ‘tis been nigh on four-hundred twenty years since we two met. The fact of thy continued life should be evidence enough that what I promised thee has come to pass. The Black Coach has not come for thee, yet thy visage is of a man of thirty.”

  “Twenty-five.” Bayard found his voice. “Let’s be accurate.”

  Stalactites of ice reached down from the ceiling as the specter responded. “Death’s Herald remains ensorcelled within the buachloch. Thou art still the master. What is thy question?”

  Try as he might, Bayard could not stop his tongue from stammering. “Something is d-different…t-things are not right. Your knife—”

  “This?” Dee held out his left hand and the pearl-handled athame appeared. “What of’t? I did give it into thy care for safekeeping. Wherefore question its power?”

  “To…to what end did it choose a victim without me?”

  “Mayhap it hears the mistress’s voice more clearly than thine.”

  Bayard flushed. “I hear her right well enough! Always there if I listen, always demanding. You never warned me it would be like this!” He felt an angry tirade building and clapped his jaws shut.

  The knife vanished from Dee’s outstretched palm, and Bayard felt its weight in his trousers pocket. He tried again. “Something isn’t right. She fights me, and…” He dreaded to say what was really in his mind. “There are omens. Signs…of something I don’t understand. Has your master changed his mind regarding our bargain?”

  The cold voice frosted the stair rail. “Thou’rt bound fast to thy fate.”

  Fury bubbled over. “I saw the red mist onstage—what was that supposed to mean? Just paying a friendly visit, to see if the play represents your lord’s interests to his liking?”

  “I ken naught of that.”

  “How can you not know?” Bayard was feeling beyond exasperated at this verbal fencing. “Don’t demons and spirits know everything that happens on the earth plane, once they cross over?”

  The floor of the basement became an ice sheet. “Thou’rt a fool, if that is what ye believe.”

  “Tell me the truth.” Bayard’s voice shook with fury. “Can she force me to turn control of the stone over to another? Because that’s what I think is going on here. There’s a plan being hatched behind my back, isn’t there? Mutiny? Maybe she’s looking for a new master, but you promised me the stone would be mine until I myself chose to give it up. I command you to tell me!”

  Silence fell like a pall over the basement. Then, “Death’s Herald is not the only presence within the buachloch. Thou’rt a clever wag—think on’t for thy answer.”

  For a split second, Bayard felt the airless vacuum of empty space, cold beyond measure, and despair so achingly pure he would have slit his own throat with Dee’s knife if he could have moved his limbs. Then he gasped in air and fell forward, hands touching the gaping crack across the floor. The shade of his tormentor was gone.

  What the hell, the bastard had just told him to figure it out for himself? Bayard was beyond fury. He scrambled back down on his belly and put his hands on the stone.

  “Radha Ó Braonáin. Attend me!” He was also beyond cajoling. As master of the cornerstone, he was taking charge and demanding
a proper response.

  This time, instead of the dead silver eyes his mind always saw when he touched the stone, a woman’s face of indeterminate age framed in iron gray hair wild as a storm over the heather took hold of his imagination. He’d not seen that face since the day he’d claimed the stone as its new master. He’d shed blood and smeared the stone with it while Dee spoke the words of power, sealing the transfer of ownership. The banshee had appeared immediately when summoned, a horrific presence swaddled in gray shrouds that billowed in an unseen wind. Behind her lurked another, a human figure, a woman. He’d had no interaction with the latter during the claiming ritual, but Dee had identified her for him.

  “What are you scheming?” Bayard demanded, stretched out on the cold tiles of the Janus basement.

  “Master Marlowe.” Her low voice was a counterpoint to the faint background scree of the banshee. “Well met, indeed.” Her laugh was guttural, all tricksy and not to be trusted, which he absolutely did not.

  “I command you to reveal to me what is in your heart and mind.”

  Her voice dropped to a near whisper. “I am yer obedient servant, so I am.”

  In his mind’s eye, the witch reached out to him, drawing him into her skinny arms and pressing him with an iron grip against her boney breast. As she held him, she began to squeeze tighter, to the point of discomfort. His body lay on the floor, but he felt every pressure point of her deadly embrace, pulling him ever tighter. And then it wasn’t just her arms wrapped around him—an aura of malice enveloped them both, pressing against him from all sides. His bones began to crack as pain wracked his body, both on the floor and in the illusion playing out in his mind. She cackled and wrapped him in her hatred, slowly and deliberately crushing every bone in his body.

  “I cannot slay thee,” she whispered, almost below hearing, “but I can indeed shew thee what is in my heart.”

  Blood leaked from the eyes and ears and mouth of the body on the floor. Bayard screamed into the void. At last she released her hold and withdrew, sinking back into the stone. His mind was blank with pain, barely able to process the fact that his ribcage was crushed against his spine, his arms and legs pulverized to shards, his neck broken…not as a dream or hallucination, but real time, in his flesh and blood body.

  He stared at the stone in white-hot agony, feeling his bones slowing finding their way back together, knitting with excruciating, glacial slowness, relentlessly mending the damage done. He saw the corpselike face of the banshee with its fish-silver eyes watching him writhe.

  “I remind you,” he gasped, choking on the blood in his esophagus, “that you …must…conceal evidence of our little party…” His vision was tunneling, his consciousness shutting down.

  At that moment thunder boomed outside, and a downpour like to the original Deluge drowned out all else. Before he passed out completely, Bayard had a brief mental image of the street outside the theater. Torrents of rain obscured a gigantic crack in the pavement that was gradually repairing itself.

  Chapter 10

  Saturday, dawn

  Pain is relative, isolatable. If one focused on a single small point, the rest retreated into the background—not gone, but reduced to a low-level drone in a symphony of shrieks. Bayard embraced this observation first-hand as he lay on his bed, concentrating all his awareness on his left arm, feeling muscles and tendons repairing around knitting bones. If he paid total attention to the returning mobility in those particular fingers and that specific wrist, he could ignore the greater misery going on in the rest of his body.

  The reversion process was well along by now, which was why he was lying on his back in his upstairs quarters instead of crumpled face down on the basement floor. The long bones had fused first, allowing him to drag himself up both sets of stairs—a teeth-gritting ordeal, but once he’d collapsed onto the bed and stretched out flat, the rest of his body had realigned itself so the repair job could go swiftly. Nothing he could do but wait for it to finish, which gave him plenty of time to think.

  With more than four hundred years to refine his technique, he’d learned what it took to control the banshee. An uneasy truce had existed between them for centuries: he provided her with the required libation and she preserved his life, and helped him prosper when he was able to situate the buachloch under the foundation of a theater. He’d never directly confronted the other one, the Irish sorceress, and so had mostly forgotten about her. But this night’s disaster brought home to him how vastly he’d underestimated what powers she might be mistress of. It simply never occurred to him she would be a threat to his safety. And that, ultimately, was the problem. As master of the stone, he’d expected her to obey him when called, but instead she’d attacked him. She couldn’t kill him, of course, but perhaps, unlike the banshee, she wasn’t spellbound to protect his life. He wasn’t surprised that she’d harbor malice toward anyone who controlled the buachloch, being trapped in it. Bayard wasn’t clear on whether turning her spellcraft against her had been an accident or a sly deceit on the part of one or both of the other parties involved in the entrapment. He’d assumed witch and banshee alike required the periodic sacrifice, maybe even shared it somehow, but now he thought probably not. Would it matter to her if he were dead and there was no one to continue the ritual? And why now, after centuries, had she come into the foreground and confronted him? He replayed Dee’s warning in his mind—Death’s Herald is not the only presence within the buachloch. Indeed.

  Bayard lay in the dark and pondered these things. Gradually the pain in his body began to fade and at last he sat up, shaken, but whole. He stripped off his bloody clothes and went unsteadily to the white-tiled bathroom. He got in the shower and turned on the water as hot as he could stand, scrubbing crusted blood from his face and hands. Eventually he felt clean, but even then he lingered under the shower head, letting hot water pelt his face and chest, standing once again hale and hearty in his twenty-five-year-old body.

  Wrapping himself in a floor-length bathrobe, Bayard returned to bed just as pallid, rainsoaked daylight was beginning to frame the windows facing the city street. Exhausted, he lay back on the pillows and closed his eyes. His soul felt ancient, desiccated. He was like an insect sucked dry by a small, innocuous-seeming spider wielding a deadly poison. After this night’s demonstration, it was clear he’d need to approach the stone with utmost caution. Although he’d survived the witch’s onslaught, the damage done to his etheric body was soul-deep, abrasive and less quick to repair. Even the idea of dealing with the day’s plans and evening rehearsal was more than he could stomach. He reached for his cell phone on a bookshelf beside the bed and thumbed Morris’s number from memory.

  When Morris answered, Bayard didn’t bother to identify himself. “I require a favor.”

  Morris responded after a few seconds’ silence. “Why? Should I be concerned?” His tone was dry, possibly ironic, definitely aloof. Bayard allowed himself a smile. Morris didn’t disappoint.

  “Let’s just say I find myself indisposed. Tonight’s rehearsal is canceled. Can I rely on you to pass the word?”

  “I can make an effort. You’re serious, aren’t you? Are you ill?”

  “Nothing a day’s rest won’t cure.”

  “Should I come check on you?”

  “No. Call Adelaide, she can contact everyone else. She has the master phone list.”

  “And yet you called me first. I’m flattered.”

  “Don’t be a prick. Just do this for me and consider yourself owed in kind.”

  “Oh, I will.” Morris’ voice was desert dry.

  Bayard punched END and put the phone down. Biggest mistake he’d made in his recent human interactions had been his one-night stand with Morris. They’d both realized it was a mistake and agreed without speaking to carry it no further. It was just that the man had reminded him of someone else, too many years ago: the tall, sharp-faced son of spymaster Walsingham. He’d been part of a threesome with a young woman as beautiful as a sea nymph. Ah, well…an old
man’s folly that wouldn’t be repeated. He wondered what Morris would think if he knew the truth.

  Bayard rolled carefully onto his side and half slept for another hour or so, listening to the deluge coming down outside, until morning began to spill through the rain-streaked windows. He got up, stretched carefully, and was relieved to find everything in place and apparently in working order. He went into the bathroom to relieve himself and stopped short.

  His face in the mirror over the sink revealed something that hadn’t been there before last night. His ginger hair, especially that of his goatee, was streaked with white.

  Chapter 11

  Saturday morning

  It was raining like hell. Had been since the wee hours of the morning and showed no sign of letting up. Well, maybe not like hell. If the production of Doctor Faustus was any standard to go by, traditional Hell was all fire and burning, not curtains of water. Standing at the kitchen window, watching it come down in sheets off the steep edge of the roof and pound onto the backyard patio, Claire wondered where a stupid expression like that had started anyway.

  Exhausted from a long shift yesterday that had been non-stop—they’d barely had time to clean and restock the ambulance between calls—she’d fallen asleep as soon as her head hit the pillow, but hadn’t slept well, and was jerked awake some time after midnight by a sharp, sudden thunderclap and sensation of falling. Heart thudding, she lay awake listening to rain pummeling the roof. Finally, she had let the noise lull her back to sleep where troubled dreams of windswept moors and galloping horses outrunning a thunderstorm left her tired and yawning when she got up the next day.

  And here it was almost noon, but still the rain came down. Most people would be pissed to be stuck inside on their day off, but she didn’t mind. Her shift varied with the weeks, and this was the first time she’d had Saturday free in months. Dressed in an oversized faded navy sweatshirt and baggy sweat pants, her hair pulled back in a quick messy braid, Claire was ready to be holed up for the day. With outside temps hovering around 39, it wasn’t quite cold enough to snow, but it was a chilled miserable day that nobody wanted to be out in. She was more than grateful that today’s rehearsal had been called off. Apparently Bayard was under the weather. He’d called Morris who’d called Addie who’d called everyone else, so their next rehearsal would be toward the end of the coming week. Just as well. Everyone knew their lines, and the production itself was pretty smooth in terms of costumes and lighting. They could actually go live with the play today if they had to. Happily that wasn’t on the agenda.