by Lee Carroll
“What are we doing here?” I asked. “Shouldn’t we be following Will—I mean past-Will?”
“We can’t follow him on foot. It’ll be dawn soon; I’ll need cover. We’ll have to hire a coach and for that we’ll need money. Here…”
He lifted a small leather sack from a chest beside the bed. “It’s not much but it should pay for a coach. It’s a shame. Leaving a tip for the maid was the one selfless act I performed in this whole fiasco and now it’s … undone.” He placed a queer emphasis on the word, as if it had suggested to him other things that might also be undone. “But we need it.” He opened the chest and pulled out a long dress of sprigged muslin. “Here, you’ll need this, too. It’s Marguerite’s. She must have been too upset to take it. It’ll fit you, of course…” He started to hand it to me, but then pressed the cloth against his face. “Lavender and rose. I’d forgotten her scent…” Then, catching my glare, he collected himself. “But I much prefer yours, of course.”
I snorted as I pulled the dress over my tank top and shucked my jeans off.
“And then what will happen?” I asked while Will laced up my dress. “How are we going to get this vampire’s blood?”
“Right after the creature changed me, I attacked it and threw it out the tower window. When it lands on the rocks below, I’ll be there waiting to drink its blood. If Morgane’s telling the truth, I’ll become mortal.” He pulled the laces tight, tugging me toward him. I felt the length of his body pressed against my back. He gathered my hair into a knot and pressed his lips to the nape of my neck. “Are you sure you won’t miss … this.” His teeth dragged across my skin and a quiver moved down my spine directly into the place where his hips spooned against mine. As I felt him harden, I wondered if we could spare a little time … but the thought of making love in the bed where he and Marguerite had made love—albeit over four hundred years ago—chilled my ardor. I took a step away and turned to face him.
“I suppose there are things we’ll both miss,” I said, trying to be honest, “but it’s your choice whether you want to live as a mortal or as how you are now. You chose to become immortal four centuries ago. Are you really sure you’re ready to choose differently now?”
My question seemed to take him by surprise. Before he could answer, a piercing musical trill filled the room. “A lark,” Will said, “warning us of the dawn’s approach. We’d better go.”
He brushed his lips lightly against mine and hurried from the room. As I followed him, something sharp stabbed through the thin slippers I’d put on with Marguerite’s dress. I knelt and pulled a pin out of my foot. It was the brooch that Marguerite had used to stab her finger. It must have fallen from her cloak in her hurry. The pin, which was long and rather lethal-looking, still bore the stain of her blood. I quickly pinned it inside the bodice of my dress, where Will wouldn’t see it and be reminded of Marguerite by it, but where it would be handy if I had need of something sharp.
29
The Swimmer
Will reached Pointe du Raz about an hour before sundown. On one speedy horse, his journey from Paimpont, which had begun at 4:30 a.m., might have taken only five or six hours, which would have meant a wait through a long afternoon before seeing Dee, perhaps wandering around the nearby village, or seaside cliffs. But the day was extraordinarily hot and humid, and Will’s tired horse had thrown a shoe in Pontivy, and it had takn hours before a farrier had been found to reshoe it. At Audierne he had stopped to water his horse and was told that the south cliff road had been damaged in the last storm and he should take the northern, and longer, route. So Will, weary from weather and waiting, found himself with only an hour or so to prepare for his session with Dee.
Walking around Pointe du Raz, Will easily recognized the tower Dee had referred to. Rising from a stone abbey, it was about five stories high, of black stone, and seemed medieval in origin, broad slits for archers to aim through rather than windows.
A huge seaside cliff jutted out into the ocean near the tower, and Will climbed a footpath hewn into its granite face. He wanted to get a better view of the tower, and to take his mind off the enormity of what was coming. The path was narrow and had many twists, turns, and reversals, high grass on the land side and a plummet to jagged rocks on the sea side. Will had to discipline himself not to look down lest he experience vertigo. But the late-day salt air was brisk, refreshing him, and the view out to sea compelling. When he encountered an embankment of grass-tufted red earth to rest on, he took the opportunity.
He gazed at the tower from this perspective and observed that the archers’ apertures were only one to a floor, each facing seaward. He wondered at the single-mindedness of builders in the long-ago past, who worried only about enemies from the sea, none from land. But the tower had survived—perhaps for several centuries—so the builders might well have known what they were doing. If only he were so confident right now … but he was certain about his decision, he reprimanded himself, when eternity with his beloved awaited this portentous encounter. People worshipped on Sundays in the less than certain hope of such an outcome, and here he had it at his fingertips! He shivered with anticipation. As if to mimic him, a gull flying above the tower shimmied in a gust of wind, then coasted down to smoother air.
Will cast a sweeping glance to the west, taking in the offshore island of Île de Sein, its fishing boats returning for the evening. The sun was low in the sky, descending toward a dark stone tower at the center of the island. As it set, brilliant light spilled across the sea, cleaving the dark water, laying a rubied path between the island and the shore. Perhaps it was an omen of his coming immortality?
As Will went back down the wind-washed path toward the tower, he kept a careful eye on the sun’s sinking disk, its orb first split by the island tower, then its upper arc of flame bisected by the horizon, then dipping beneath it. Another shudder of anticipation went through him. He saw a twinkling light go on in the island tower and then, as if in response, one go on in the top room of the tower just below him. Startled, Will nearly took one step too many over the crumbling edge of the path. He pulled back just in time. All he could see in the room was a candle’s twinkle. But he speeded up his pace as if he’d seen Marguerite herself.
Approaching the tower, Will observed that the entrance to it was actually through the abbey, which had been built right up against the tower’s stone façade. High tide had come into an inlet in front of the abbey to a distance of fifty feet or so from the front door. Will amused himself in the lingering heat by walking ankle depth through the water’s foamy surge, scooping up a few palmfuls of water and splashing them over his sweat-streaked face, as if baptizing his upcoming transfmation in some ritual. The last rays of the setting sun dyed the water red. As he cupped the water, it felt to him as if he were anointing himself with handfuls of blood. A fitting baptism, he thought, for birth into immortality.
* * *
A friar so deeply cowled that Will could not make out his face led Will silently to the door of the tower, then motioned for him to continue on his own.
The way up the tower was a serpentine iron stairs lit by torches on each landing that faced the one door on each floor. Will tread with caution up the stairs, their gloomy half-light between floors interrupted by moths and shadows. He felt tension over his destiny above and at the ominous darker shadows; his knees would tremble, or he might pause to take several deep breaths. But he made it up to the top floor, drew himself up to his fullest height, clutched the all-important satchel possessively to his side, reassured himself by feeling Marguerite’s ring in his pocket, and knocked on John Dee’s door.
“Who is it?”
Will recognized the deep voice. “Will Hughes at your service. Per your request. I have brought the essentials.”
The grin splitting Dee’s triangular-bearded face as he opened the door was as wide as the ocean. But no expression could have been colder. His amber, glittery gaze transfixed Will’s. It suggested inner depth, but also had the opaqueness of a
lizard’s scales. Had Will grasped the affect more fully, he might have fled down the airless stairs and left immortality for another day.
Dee extended his right hand as if to shake Will’s, but then swung it farther and tried to grab the satchel. Will blocked the maneuver by swiveling away at the last instant. Dee, like a good sport, patted Will amiably on the shoulder. “A pleasure to meet you again, young man. Perhaps you are right to approach me cautiously. I am not offended that you do not trust me with your bag. For what is of greater value than immortality? Indeed, let us have a frank discussion before our exchange is completed. Come, sit on my suffah, please. It has a stirring view of the sea.”
Will obliged him by sitting on the elegant bench upholstered in oriental fabric Dee had referred to as a suffah, and looking out at the ocean through an archer’s slit across from him that seemed to have widened. From the cliff this opening had looked no more than four to five inches across, but now it was something like a two-foot square in shape, a small window. Will kept a viselike grip on his satchel, wrapping it to his chest with crossed arms, and wondered how his impression from the cliff could have been so wrong. Then he looked farther out to sea, a view that was indeed majestic. The tower on the island off the coast was silhouetted against a violet sky. The ocean had turned a deep purple, reminding Will of a line the poet had once quoted from the Greeks: the wine-dark sea. Will then turned his attention to Dee, who was staring with a bemused expression at the satchel and Will’s fierce grip on it.
“I understand your covetousness,” Dee said. “The box is rare and potent. Not to mention such a beautiful ring, concealed somewhere on you now, on your person or in the satchel. But you might want to relax your grip a little. After al, it is I who will need box and ring to effect your transformation—you do have the ring with you, don’t you?”
Will nodded.
“I will need it to summon a creature who can make you immortal. I will do that. So, alas, you will have to release box and ring into my possession before my end of the bargain can be concluded. In other words, good man, the news is that you will have to trust me. Otherwise we are fiddling away our time over nothing. There is no other way.”
Will saw the logic of what Dee was saying, but he didn’t like it.
Then he was startled by a brisk wind that entered the room, undulating tapestries that hung on the walls, strewing papers from Dee’s desk to the floor, even rippling the strands of Dee’s thinning hair. It was chilly and dense with surf and salt. Will glanced out the window and saw fresh-blown waves cresting up the beach close to the tower. A line of dark thunderclouds was amassing in the west behind the tower on the small island. He had the strange impression that the tower was standing between the storm and the mainland, as if guarding the shore from some barbarian invasion.
Will affixed Dee with the most intimidating stare he could muster. “Who is this amazing being you will summon, who will bring me immortality?”
Dee ignored Will’s forbidding expression, smiled benignly back. “We are dealing with forces of great potency here, my lad. You can hardly expect beings associated with such forces to be sweet and cuddly. That is the only perspective I can offer. Suffice it to say that if you cannot deal with the fearsome, you should not be here. Otherwise, the sooner you hand over box and ring, the sooner we can proceed.” Dee’s soft look transformed to one of impatience.
Again Will saw Dee’s logic, but his heart told him to hesitate. He had not thought through this meeting enough in advance. He hadn’t realized this sort of vulnerability could occur.
“Sir Dee, can you provide me with proof—or at least evidence—that this process is going to be successful before I hand over these objects to you, however temporarily? They’re not my property. I need to return them to my beloved.”
“Ah, the beatific Marguerite,” Dee said, as if he’d forgotten about her. “I’m sure she will be overjoyed to have her possessions returned. Your solicitousness about them, and her, is to be admired. But, no, if you want to make a point of it, you can’t have ‘evidence’ or ‘proof.’ The transaction belongs to a realm in which such concepts don’t exist. On one side of your decision is the great John Dee with his impeccable intellect and moral grandeur, and the ecstasy that will be yours spending eternity with Marguerite. On the other side is a sniveling coward’s surrender to weakness. I cannot make the choice for you, Hughes. I can say which choice I think you’re going to make, given your sound judgment, your physical beauty that suggests a moral one as well, in fact your magnetic presence sitting here before me now.”
A glitter came into Dee’s gaze that made Will uncomfortable. “I could be wrong about your choice. Ibeloat case please withdraw from me before I cast your pestilence into the sea. But I hope I am right. It is up to you. I await your judgment.” The glitter in Dee’s eyes subsided into something else more subdued, more remote. A less acute longing? Will couldn’t tell.
Still uncertain, he relaxed his possessiveness about the satchel enough to lay it on a cushion to his side. Dee remained several paces away at the opposite wall. Will then took the ring out of his pocket and held it up before him in the dim candlelight, looking at it as if the duration of his gaze could ensure its power. At one angle the stone appeared blank, but then tilted to another angle the design appeared. A tower. Perhaps this tower. Perhaps Marguerite’s ring had been leading him to this very tower … to this fate. Surely that was a sign.
He looked up from the ring and was startled to find Dee’s face only inches from his own, his amber eyes riveted on the ring. Dee’s hand was stretched out, his long, yellowish fingernails nearly touching it. Will shrank back from the avarice in Dee’s eyes and the man’s clawlike hand, clutching after the ring in Will’s fist. But then why had he come if not to relinquish the ring and the box into the wizard’s hands? He was unwilling to return to Marguerite still a mortal. He would have to trust Dee.
He handed the box over to him first, then the ring. Dee touched a pattern of concentric circles on the box with one of his long fingernails. In the flickering candlelight the lines seemed to move … they were moving. They began to revolve in circles like a model of Ptolemy’s universe that Will’s science tutor used to bore him with. Faster and faster, like a whirlpool, so fast that looking at them began to make Will dizzy. He wrenched his eyes away and saw that the whirlpool effect was not limited to the lid of the box. The air above the box was moving in the same circular motion, the disturbance expanding outward in a reverse conical shape that picked up the papers on Dee’s desk and tossed them into the wind like autumn leaves before a storm …
A storm that had spread to the sea. The water outside was now thrashing, as if in response to the maelstrom raging here in the tower room. Dee carefully placed the box on the windowsill, lifted the lid, and lowered the ring into the box. He chanted a string of Latin words out of which Will, never the best Latin scholar, caught only vita and perpetua. Perpetual life. Yes, that’s what he had come for, he reassured himself, even as he began to feel an oppressive, stifling sense of being crushed in the room, a sort of airless panic. Perhaps the storm was sucking air out into its vortex. This claustrophobic breathlessness tempted Will to flee room and tower immediately, without box and ring. But a moment’s glance outside dissuaded him.
A flash of silver light leaped from the box, streaked across the water, and struck the tower on the island off the coast. In response, a silver beam emanated from the tower, lighting a path back across the ocean. In the unearthly light, Will could see that the ocean was boiling like an evil witch’s potion. A long, low moan issued from the depths of the ocean.
“He has awoken,” Dee said, a ghastly smile on his face. Then, pointing his crooked and yellowed nail out the window: “He is coming!”
“What is coming? poeature that will make me immortal? It’s coming from the sea? What exactly is it?” Will asked the questions in quick succession while backing away from the window, realizing only now that he should have asked these questions sooner. But
it was too late. Dee was right. It was coming. Something was swimming through the water at an impossible rate, heading straight toward the tower.
Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Dee chuckling at him. Dee pushed himself back from his desk, leaned against the wall in his chair, and laughed even more enthusiastically when he saw how tormented Will was. His jovial relaxation said to Will, You’re mine, now. All mine. Will suddenly knew that he had made a terrible mistake. He had to get out of here before the monster Dee had summoned reached the tower. He sprang for the door … and found his way blocked by the tall, cowled friar who had opened the abbey door for him before. A flash of lightning lit his face, and Will gasped in horror. It was Charles Roget—Lightning Hands himself!
“You! You scoundrel!” Will cried, backing away. “You followed me here!”
In answer Roget lifted his hands, rubbed his fingertips together, and flung a ball of lightning at Will. The missile hit Will square in the chest and sent him flying across the room, crashing into the wall. He slid to the floor and lay stunned, staring up at Dee and Roget.
“Why should I follow you here when this is my abbey? My dear friend Sir John Dee and I have been waiting for you. Waiting for you and for our honored guest.”
Roget pointed at the window above Will’s head. Looking up, Will saw that the honored guest had arrived.
The creature appeared to be an amalgamation of all the nightmares of the deep. Needle fangs curved down several inches below his chin, dripping with blood, perhaps from gulls encountered crossing the beach and going up the tower walls. His crimson-irised eyes seemed hot with hate, and their flame-pupils seemed drawn toward Will’s tender lips. This monster coming through the window had the beak of a squid, the scales of a sea serpent, and thousands of trailing locks that were actually, on closer scrutiny, writhing eels festering on its head. Each of the eels had sharp, tiny fangs that seemed to incline toward Will as fermenting stench might be drawn toward perfume.
