by Gideon, John
“The same kid we took out on the town Saturday night.”
“And the one we’ve been working with for the last two days.
I keep thinking about what Dr. Craslowe said: that Jeremy’s been through a hellish ordeal for the past thirteen years and that we’ve got to expect his attitude and emotions to swing back and forth as he goes on with his recovery, but that doesn’t explain some of the other things.”
“You don’t really think Jeremy can read minds, do you? Is that what you’re driving at? Listen, Bush, the kid is world-class perceptive—that much is certain—and it’s the combination of his perceptiveness and intelligence that makes you think he’s reading your mind. It’s an illusion, a trick that he sets you up to play on yourself.”
“What about Dad’s voice?”
“That’s an easy one. If you could hear a recording today of what Jeremy said to you—in what you thought was your dad’s voice—you’d say that it doesn’t sound like him at all. If the language was similar, it was probably because you talk that way yourself, and Jeremy was only imitating you. You heard what you heard because your imagination was running wild, and you were in a state of shock over all this sudden hostility. The kid doesn’t read minds, Bush. Nobody does.”
“Okay, maybe I buy all that. It still doesn’t explain the hostility, or the obsession with keeping a part of his life private from me—his personal affairs, he calls them.”
“Good God, why is that so surprising? You were an only child yourself, Bush. If you’ll think back a minute to when you were a kid, you’ll remember you owned a part of the household, almost like a little fiefdom, that was all yours—separate and apart from the world of adults—and you didn’t have to share it with anyone. You had no brothers or sisters—remember?—nobody who wanted a piece of it. You had your room, your toys, your clothes, and you learned very early what it means to have a personal life, one that belongs to you and nobody else. Why shouldn’t your kid want the same thing?”
“And the hostility?”
Renzy undid a sailor’s knot in his hank of rope and poked it into a hip pocket, holding back a moment, thinking. Finally: “I don’t know the answer to that one. I could hazard a few more guesses, but good God, I’m no shrink. My opinion on that score wouldn’t be worth much, I’m afraid.”
Carl patted his friend on the shoulder. “No matter. You’ve been a help, Renzy; more than I can tell you. It’s good to have an objective view on things like this, especially from someone who cares. Know what else? I appreciate your friendship, all you’ve done: lending me your car, helping me get this place in shape, not to mention letting me cry on your shoulder. I’ll make it up to you some day.”
“Does that mean you’ll become a partner in the genital cosmetics business?” asked Renzy, grinning slyly.
“Let’s not get carried away with this friendship thing,” answered Carl with a mock frown that he could not hold for long, and they both laughed.
“What do you say we kick this job in the ass, finish it, and get ready for a nice quiet dinner at the Moorage? Crating the rest of this stuff won’t take more than half an hour, and after that, all we have to do is scrub the floors and wash the windows. Another couple of hours and we’ll be out of here.”
“Carl,” said Renzy somewhat hesitantly, dropping the nickname he’d pinned on his buddy when they were boys, “I have something to tell you. It’s not easy—I mean, it’s about something that Jeremy told you yesterday, the part about Lorna and me—”
“Don’t worry about it,” said Carl, about to lug a box to the back room. “I didn’t believe him for a minute. He was only trying to hurt me with a lie. I probably shouldn’t even have told you about it.”
“That’s the problem: He wasn’t lying.”
Carl straightened and stared wide-eyed at Renzy, wondering if he had heard correctly. “You mean—you and Lorna?”
“I’m afraid so. I should’ve leveled with you long before this, but I—well, I wasn’t sure what Lorna herself might’ve told you. Besides that, I—”
“She never mentioned it to me,” said Carl, feeling a little numb. He kneaded the back of his neck, then pocketed his hands and let a few more long moments drift by. “Were you in love with her?”
Renzy nodded, his green eyes sad. “You can understand that, I hope. It wasn’t what you could call a storybook romance; in fact, we were in the process of breaking up when she—when she died. For a few horrible days afterward, I worried that maybe she had killed herself because—uh, because—”
“Because of the breakup?”
“Something like that, I guess. But the fact is, Carl, she wasn’t madly in love with me, not like I was with her—at least not during those last few months. We started off like gang-busters, had about six months of that old I’m-in-love-and-the-whole-word-is-wonderful feeling. We kept things pretty private, which was my idea, since I’m just one cut above the town drunk on the social register around here. That distinction, by the way, belongs to Mitch Nistler. Remember him from the old days? Weird little guy with thick glasses who nobody could stand?
“Anyway, I don’t think Lorna even told her mother and sister about us, which suited me just fine. We saw each other whenever we could, which wasn’t all that often, because it wasn’t easy to find someone to take care of Jeremy, even for a few hours. Then, after a while, Lorna started getting depressed, becoming afraid of things she wouldn’t talk about, withdrawn. I almost felt like I didn’t know her anymore. She shut me out, along with everything and everybody else, and it became clear that our relationship wasn’t going anywhere. So—shit, you can guess the rest.”
“You hadn’t been planning to marry her?”
“I was on the brink of asking her a couple of times, but I never did. What could I have given her? Or for that matter, what could I have been for her? Here I am, running out of money, no real prospects—Christ, she was entitled to better than that. Besides, I always had the feeling that she had never really gotten over you.”
Carl wandered over to the crate on which he had set his can of soda and took a long sip. “I suppose that should make me feel a little better, but it doesn’t,” he said, bleeding inside.
Renzy lit another cigarette. “Remember her memorial service, when I was just sort of standing on the beach, not getting too close to the crowd in the park? If you hadn’t caught sight of me out there, I probably wouldn’t have come any closer, because I was feeling so guilty. I felt like I had done you shit, Carl, and I was scared of talking to you. On top of that, I didn’t want to run into Stu Bromton, not just then.”
“Why not? What’s Stu got to do with all this?”
Renzy blew out a lungful of smoke, staring at his old friend in disbelief.
“You mean you don’t know? After all these years, you really don’t know? Carl, listen: Stu has had it bad for Lorna ever since you first started taking her out back at UW. He never tried to horn in on you, because you and he were friends, and he knew he wouldn’t have gotten to first base anyway, not with you around. After your divorce he actually made a few clumsy moves in Lorna’s direction, but hell, he was the chief of police and the son-in-law of the mayor, so he had to watch his step. Needless to say, his efforts sort of fizzled.”
“Hippo in love with Lorna? God, I feel like I’m dreaming. You I can understand, Renzy, but Hippo—”
“His marriage to Judy is a cruel joke,” Renzy went on. “He hates her—actually hates her—and I don’t doubt he hates his kids, too, along with his whole damn life, probably. This thing about the missing people has turned him into a grade-A basket case, which is understandable, I guess’. The man is not a happy camper, Carl, and he’s especially unhappy with me: thinks I’m a profligate jerk and a bum—which of course I am, but that’s beside the point.
“When I first starting seeing Lorna, Stu and I were still friendly, and I let on to him what was going on between her and me. Real mistake, that was. I found out that he’d never gotten over her. He damn near demanded
that I stop seeing her, got insanely jealous and predicted that I’d be a disaster for her. I haven’t given up on the idea of salvaging my friendship with him, but even so, I’m sure he thinks I had something to do with her suicide. So you can see why I wasn’t anxious to run into him at the memorial service.”
“Yeah.”
“I needed to tell you about this, Carl, because I value your friendship, and I want things to be on the up-and-up between us. I also want you to know that I’m sorry.”
Carl smiled faintly, sadly. “No forgiveness needed. Lorna and I were divorced, a condition I brought on myself. I don’t have any right to feel hurt, and certainly no right to be pissed off at you. I was just a little—surprised.”
“You’re not going to rip my arm off and beat me to death with it?”
“Not hardly. Who would I get to take me sailing in the San Juans?”
As evening fell, the drizzly mist floated eastward across the Puget Sound, driven by a sharp winter breeze that left a scatter of forlorn stars above Greely’s Cove. Carl and Renzy finished their work at the storefront on Frontage Street and ambled back to the bungalow on Second Avenue, chatting quietly as old friends do, often slipping into a private jargon of their boyhood that an outsider would have found unintelligible. Carl grew quiet as they neared the little house that squatted dark and silent between the tall pines in the front yard.
“Something’s wrong,” he said, as they turned onto the walk that led to the porch.
“No kidding,” replied Renzy. “Your yard looks like a fucking biological warfare experiment. What’s happened to the shrubbery, for cripes’ sake? The grass is half-dead, and even those old pines are taming yellow.”
“That’s not what I mean. If Jeremy were here, like he’s supposed to be, there’d be some lights on.” Carl dug for his keys as they clomped onto the porch, unlocked the door, and pushed it open, only to be greeted by darkness and silence.
Just as Carl had feared, Jeremy was gone.
Robinson Sparhawk sat quietly in the stuttering candlelight and tried not to watch Hannie Hazelford disrobe, though she clearly suffered no compunction over doing so in the presence of a man she had met only one day earlier. Nakedness was a requirement of the business she was about, a very serious business that allowed for no squeamish modesty.
Robbie tried to concentrate instead on the mysterious paraphernalia of the small room: the incredibly old-looking tomes that lined the walls on sagging shelves, the ornately carved wooden table that stood on waxen blocks at the center of a pentagram inscribed on the floor, the murky bottles and jars that sat in clusters atop musty cabinets and bureaus (most were full of vile-looking liquids and powders and chips and chunks of things he dared not even guess about).
But try as he might, he could not resist staring at the spectacle of Hannie’s nakedness as she peeled off the last of her clothing. Her leathery breasts hung flat against her sunken chest, pendulous and long empty of flesh. Her rattleboned arms and legs were so spindly that they appeared near breaking. The skin of her misshapen torso hung in droopy folds and creases, giving the impression that her organs were rolling around loose inside.
Off came the blond wig, revealing a nearly bald and spotted skull that looked too ancient to house a living brain. Lastly, she removed her turquoise contact lenses and replaced them with a pair of silvery pince-nez that perched crookedly on the bridge of her nose, enlarging her filmy eyes beyond absurdity.
Naked but for her pince-nez and shiny witch’s ring, she sat down at the table and opened the hinged wooden box that lay before her on a thick block of wax, inside which was the instrument that she had reverently shown Robbie the previous day—the scrying mirror. Its round obsidian surface and pewter mounting gleamed softly in the candlelight.
“I’m quite ready now,” she said, glancing up at Robbie. “I must warn you that I may behave strangely, once the scrying begins, and I may even appear to be in some distress. But under no circumstances should you try to help me or even communicate with me. Any interference by you could be extremely dangerous to us both. Is that understood?”
“Quite,” replied the Texan, imitating her British manner. “I’m s’posed to sit here and watch, nothing else.”
“Very good. I must warn you, too, that you yourself may be affected, owing to your own considerable psychic ability. You may see unsettling images, feel forces around you, but you must take great care not to unleash any of your own psychic energy, no matter how frightened you become. My scrying spell will protect us both, unless of course you interfere, either psychically or physically, which would be akin to battering down our defenses from within.”
“Don’t worry, Hannie,” said Robbie. “I’ll hold my self back, no matter what happens.”
Hannie then leaned forward until her senescent face hung directly over the scrying mirror, but with her eyes closed, her bony hands alongside her head with palms facing downward and fingers pointed stiffly toward the lustrous disk of obsidian. Her old lips, wiped clean of lipstick, began to move. From her mouth issued low, sibilant words that Robbie had never heard before—a language as ancient, he imagined, as the human species itself. After seven repetitions of a long phrase, she broke into heavily accented English that was very unlike the modern British dialect she normally spoke, grammatically familiar but hard to understand because of its singsongy, weirdly modulated tones and exaggerated diphthongs.
Was this the English of centuries past, Robbie wondered, perhaps spoken in the manner of Shakespeare or Henry VIII, from an era when Hannie Hazelford was already one of the oldest humans alive?
Mother under the Sea, with whom Woman is One,
In the fullness of Lammass now having begun,
Using Mugwort, Plantain and an herb called Stime,
Have I proffered a Plea and uttered a Rhyme....
She began to rock back and forth in short, rhythmic jerks, eyes suddenly open wide and fixed upon the disk. Robbie detected the papery sound of her nipples brushing the wooden tabletop. Gone now was any doubt in Robbie’s mind that everything Hannie had told him was anything but the awful truth.
Throughout the previous afternoon and deep into the night, from the very moment he had been summoned to this cottage, he had listened to her dark story while sitting in her comfortable parlor and sipping tea from a Wedgwood cup that Hannie kept perpetually full, munching little cakes that she brought from her cupboard until he could not eat one more bite. They’d graduated eventually to gin, which Hannie seemed only too happy to pour, until Robbie had become so tipsy that he could not possibly have driven back to the motel. He’d had no choice but to let her put him up in a spare room.
With the coming of morning, the telling had resumed, over breakfast and continuing through midmorning coffee, then over lunch and afternoon snacks and finally supper, interspersed occasionally with her interrogating him thoroughly about his ordeal at Whiteleather Place.
That he had stayed so many hours with this queer old crone in her little cottage, listening raptly to her words like a newly initiated disciple at the feet of a wizened holy man, would itself have seemed incredible, had not her words given him answers to the dark questions that had plagued him since an episode years ago at Carlyle Lake. Having recently met the thing that called itself Monty Pirtz, Robbie had needed those answers more desperately than he had ever needed anything in his life. Hannie had supplied them. In addition, she had been hospitable and kind.
She radiated a feeling of power and, more important, of hope, to which Robbie felt himself drawn—power against the evil that had nearly consumed him on the front porch of Whiteleather Place, and hope that there was some way to defeat it, kill it, cleanse the earth of it.
With these Nine Herbs, which are Three times Three,
And the power of the Words, which comes from Thee,
I shall loose this Charm into the World of Light
To guard me from harm and to save me this night
From Craft of vile Creatures, whose Names Thou
dost know,
And to grant me Thy Favor, O Mother Below...
She lapsed again into the old tongue that would have sounded like gibberish to Robbie, had it not been so fulsome and rhythmic, so alive with power. His crutches lay across his lap, and he discovered that he was gripping one of them so tightly that his hands ached. He wished that Katharine were with him, sitting beside his chair with her massive head resting comfortingly on his knee, and not locked away in the spare bedroom as Hannie had insisted. Dogs, the old witch had explained, are psychically sensitive and easily frightened by the energies released during a scrying session. If a huge dog like Katharine were to go berserk during the session, the result could be disastrous.
Hannie fell silent at last and leaned forward to stare closely into the black surface of the mirror, a hunkered caricature of the ancient hag, her face twitching and contorting in the dancing candlelight. Robbie stared at that face, scarcely daring to breathe and feeling the first tentative tingling of his own psychic nerves.
It was happening now, whatever it was, this business of scrying, by which Hannie had learned of his nearly catastrophic meeting with Monty Pirtz two nights ago, by which she had located him on Sunday afternoon at Liquid Larry’s. For a seasoned practitioner like Hannie, the scrying mirror was a window into time and space, through which she could locate and observe the doings, comings and goings of others—past, present, and future. With it she could track the forces of the unseen world.
Yes, the Old Truth was real—of that Robbie was certain beyond any flittering doubt. He felt ashamed for having so neatly ridiculed Mona Kleinian’s attempts over the years to make him see this. But now he had come face-to-face with it—if one could indeed say that Monty Pirtz had a face—and he had taken Hannie Hazelford’s crash course on the subject. He had become a true believer.
